September 23rd, 2016
 
It’s All About Me this week!…well the children! We have and continue to spend time learning about each other through our Me Bag presentations. Having the opportunity to see the objects and memories that are important to each child and represent themselves and their families has been wonderful. This week we also learned what colour eyes we have, what everyone’s favourite colours are and how many boys and girls we have here at Blooming Butterflies. Learning about our eyes has definitely been interesting. There was a question asked about why Pan’s cat eyes look different than ours. This led into a discussion about how cats can see better at night than we can and also what the pupil and iris are. We have some curious minds! After learning the colour of everyone’s eyes we worked together to make a tally of each colour. We then identified which colour has the most and least tally marks. We also made a bar graph for our favourite colours and amount of boys and girls. 

It seems there is always talk about how tall one another are; so we decided to measure ourselves using blocks. We worked as a team to build a tower of blocks for each individual to count and compare. Some of us do not like being considered smaller than their friends so this led to and important conversation about how it does not matter how tall you are; everyone is special and we all grow in our own time. 
 
We made ink fingerprints and took a good hard look, with the help of magnifying glasses, at them and came to the conclusion that no one has the same fingerprints. Each of us have unique fingerprints that make us different from anyone else. 
 
We explored our senses with our name craft this week. We smelled, tasted and used multiple spices to make our names. Some spices were definitely favoured over others. Spices we used were seasoning salt, cumin, cinnamon, chili powder, and dry mustard.

Some other activities we did for All About Me include; drawing a self portrait on a mirror made of tin foil (it’s a very different material to draw on), drawing the face of ourselves or a member of our family (it was quite entertaining to see the rainbow teeth, crazy eyes and blue beards that were drawn), decorating paper bodies to have the characteristics of a person, whether that be ourselves or someone who is important to us (some of us even practiced cutting and pasting paper clothes), and making All About Me puzzles that were fun to colour, cut, and rearrange to make funny combinations of clothing that turned different people.

E, E, Elephant was your chant for the letter E. We made an E for Elephant craft, built E with popsicle sticks (also built other things afterwards), fall leaf glitter, and play dough. We practiced the sound that E makes and found words that start with E…boy it is tricky because E has two sounds!
 
See everyone soon!
 
Xoxo Ms Audra

September 16th, 2016

Are you a Bucket Filler?

Our back door is full of kind words, bucket filling activities and ways that we can be bucket fillers. So many wonderful ideas from saying please and thank you to helping our friends and laying in the grass watching the sun.

"How Full is Your Bucket?" by Tom Roth and Mary Reckmeyer is a story that teaches us that every person and even animal has an invisible bucket above their heard. When that bucket is full we feel amazing and when it is empty we do not. With this concept in mind we began learning about the difference between a Bucket Filler and a Bucket Dipper. We continue to work on how to recognize the feelings of others and ourselves. Specifically the cause and effect or our words and actions.

There have been many great songs about bucket filling, peace and being a kind person that we have listened to. Red Grammar has some really great songs about this topic. 

We talked about what peace meant in the context of Bucket Filling; being a kind and friendly person. We used our pincher fingers to peel and stir stickers on a peace sign and traced the letter PEACE.  We did a cut and paste paper bucket craft where we practiced cutting straight and curved lines, then glued on tissue that we crumpled to resemble the water. We also decorated a plastic bucket with stickers and filled it with pretend water in the form of tissue paper.

We are fascinated with the idea of rolling dice so we rolled different types of dice to practice identifying and counting numbers 1-12.  We then had to find the number bucket that corresponded to the number we rolled.

The letter of the week was F. We brainstormed words that start with the letter F, used play dough to form the letter ( we’re getting good practice at rolling play dough),  traced F with buttons, used shaving cream to write the letter F in, and created an F for FOX craft. We loved the Letter F song by abcmouse.com. I’m pretty sure some of you may have been hearing parts of the song sung at home now because the tune is definitely stuck in our heads! In relation to this, I heard the funniest thing from a little one about songs getting stuck in your head…with an extremely serious face he said “ I can actually fit TWO songs in my head because my head is so big!”

Our special leader days have begun! These little leaders have been working hard helping with our calendar activities, recording the weather, organizing the dishes and foods for our meals, and being the one to lead the line when we go outdoors. It has been nice to see some Me Bags presented during our morning meetings. We have seen family photos, favourite stuffs, sports awards/medals, homemade toys, trinkets/souvenirs from traveling, favourite books and songs…there have been many wonderful things and I cannot wait to see what the special leaders bring this coming week!

September 9th, 2016

What a busy week it has been! Everyone’s been busy learning, making new friends and having fun! This week has been all about emotions; how to identify them, describe them and understand why we or our friends feel the way we do in different situations. A key component to learning about our feelings is knowing how to regulate them as well. We had some fun doing our Calm Down Yoga. “I am strong. I am kind. I am brave. I am friendly. I am wise.” We had a discussion about what each of these concepts means and how to exemplify them. This is just the beginning; we will continue to address these concepts through out the year.

The Story Bots were a musical way to help us listen to and view various feelings. Love and grumpy seemed to be the favourites! We practiced identifying and matching feelings cards and acting them out.

It was quite fun to use rocks with facial features to create and rearrange different faces, representing a new feeling each time that we had to figure out. We also practiced drawing how we feel.....or for some this turned into drawing the type of feeling they wanted to draw. Funny! We also made emotion masks by using half of a paper plate and drawing only a nose and a mouth to represent their emotion. We had the chance to try wearing each others masks. Everyone tried their hand a patterning for the first time this year as well. We practiced the ABAB pattern with images of how other kids were feeling.

Many of us seem to love to practice cutting and drawing. Right now we're working on proper pencil grasp and holding scissors in the correct position. We have also been using tracing cards to trace various types of lines to build our coordination when we draw or write. We have some quick learners!

The letter we learned about this week was L. We recognized that there was a difference between uppercase and lowercase. We listened and sang to alphabet and letter L songs, while also listening for the sound L makes and words that begin with L. We practiced identifying and forming L by using our bodies to build it, writing L in a salt tray (returning children were great helpers teaching the new children how to do it) and forming L with play dough. We played letter matching searching games, as well as making a letter L for lion craft (following multiple instructions can be tricky!).

Our names magically appeared when we adding watercolour paints to salt. Watching the colour spread before our eyes as amazing.

Some other things we did this week include sequencing games, opposites/equals puzzles, working with play dough to build our hand muscles, played duck duck goose and sat around a pretend campfire roasting marshmallows and hot dogs.

​Xoxo Ms Audra

A new school year has begun! It has been wonderful to see so many new and returning faces.

We started off the school year by reading a story called “The Kissing Hand” by Audrey Penn. It’s a lovely story about a little raccoon named Chester who does not want to be without his mom at school. Mommy raccoon kisses the palm of his hand and tells him a secret. If you ever feel lonely at school just remember that you will always carry a kiss from mom and dad in the palm of your hand; they will always be with you. 

Following this story, we used a sparkly felt board to place two “kissing hands”,  upon which we placed our own hands to match, and sorted between small and large sized hearts. These hearts were also used to go on a scavenger hunt. ”The Kissing Hand" character memory match was a game we played and we used the character Chester Raccoon to help us sequence the numbers one through ten. We also turned Chester Raccoon into a paper bag puppet.

Plenty of time this week was spent getting messy and working with our hands. On our first day of school we painted our hands to make our first day handprints. We enjoyed making pieces of art where we used a variety of brushes to create with, i.e. paintbrushes, foam brushes, toothbrushes, Q-Tips, etc. A straw was used in another artwork to blow watercolour paints across the page. Practicing with scissors, hole punchers, letter stamps and rulers was a bunch of fun too. And we played with water, using a variety of bowls sizes, spoons, funnels, tubes and syringes. Some of these tools were a bit tricky for us but we were very determined.

We practiced forming the letters of our name by using small colourful squares to trace over the lines in the letters of our names, as well as used watercolours paints to magically reveal our name hidden underneath (wax resist). Identifying and building our letters came in the form of stamp painting with foam letters, building letters with our letter construction kit and playing a letter Identification game using spray bottles to “erase” the correct letter. It was a great work out for those little hands!

Everyone worked on building Mat Man (from the Handwriting Without Tears Program) using Big and Little Curves, as well as Big and Little Lines. We are learning this vocabulary that will help us with our writing. Mat Man also helps us to see the basic parts of the body so that when we draw people we remember that people are more than just a head with legs. We had a fun time using a mirror to help us draw a self- portrait.

This week we played with shapes through matching activities, making shape designs using coloured pattern shapes, and making a square collage (discriminating between small, medium and large sizes).

We spent a lot of time in the kitchen; baking muffins for snack and pizzas for lunch.

This week we have had a fun time learning everyone’s names and playing with new and old friends. I bet this school year is going to be nothing shy of amazing!