Oct. 28th, 2016

Spooooooky! Halloween will soon be here! We started off our week learning about our skeletons. We have so many bones in our body, but so many more as we get older. How interesting. We used white paint and Q-Tips to make our hand/arm prints into skeleton hands. 

We used ghosts to practice our number recognition, counting and matching. We also made some paper plate and tissue paper ghosts to decorate for Halloween.

We became scientists this week. We made potions (baking soda and vinegar) that could turn anyone into a frog or a bat! So we had to be careful not to touch! The baking soda and vinegar reaction was so exciting; the look on their faces was priceless.

Did you know bats sleep upside down! We found this very odd and attempted to turn ourselves upside down…but our faces just turned red so we decided it would not be comfortable to sleep that way. We made our own bat using our cut out handprints as the wings. Hands are tricky to cut out!

We represented numbers with our thumbprints and then turned them into spiders. Some of us even added two numbers spiders together to make a new number of spiders. Because we were exploring spiders we made a glow in the dark spider web by threading special yarn around cuts in a paper plate.

Mmmmm candy corn…well the paper version anyway. We practice our ability to tear paper; it can be tricky. We always have to remember to put our pincher fingers together in order to tear the paper. We were quite determined!
Magic C Bunny made a few appearances this week while we were learning about the letter C. He loves letters; especially the letter C. We discovered so many words that begin with the letter C! We also made a C for caterpillar craft.

We practiced some letter sounds this week by matching halloween images to their beginning sounds. Everyone worked great as a team to figure it out.

What better way to end a Friday than by baking cookies. We scooped, measured and worked together to count scoops and clean up our mess when we were done. Great team work!

October 21st, 2016

Everything Pumpkins! What better way to start getting ready for Halloween than by learning with and about pumpkins. It was fun exploring numbers, feelings and emotions through our 5 little pumpkins song. We practiced symmetry and shape identification; both sides have to match. Everyone did a great job taking turns to draw a symmetrical pumpkin eye to complete the image. Some of those shapes are tricky to draw! We also practiced symmetry through our paper plate pumpkin faces; remembering the names of some shapes and how to represent different emotions. We practiced cutting on a curve by making our own pumpkin puppets the resemble the 5 little pumpkins song we have been practicing.

Do pumpkins float or sink? We all thought it would sink because it was heavy. Turns our it floats! Pumpkins float because they have so much air inside of them, just like the lifejackets you wear when you go swimming. We decided to put an even bigger pumpkin in the water to see if maybe that one would sink. The results remained the same except this time it spilled water over the edges of the bucket because it takes up more of the space the water was using. We learned so much through this experiment!

What colours can pumpkins be? A few of us could not believe that pumpkins could be a colour other than orange. Using chop sticks, shaving cream and food colouring we mixed yellow and red together makes orange!

Some pumpkins are big and some are small. We tried to figure out which pumpkin was the largest so we measured the circumference of our pumpkins using a piece of yarn. After we measured the pumpkins we scrubbed them clean so we could cut them open. We knew there were seeds inside but did not know how much pulp would be in there. The expressions on everyone’s faces when placing their hands inside the pumpkin were priceless! After exploring the inside of the pumpkin we separated the seeds from the pulp. We also had a chance to use the pumpkin seeds to practice number formation, identification and representation. 

Number Hunt time! We had to work together to find the numbers 1 through 10 hidden throughout the room. Everyone worked so well as a team! We sure are getting good at recognizing our numbers! The next challenge was to figure out the proper number sequence. Then came some fun…we counted the numbers while jumping past them.
We used our pumpkin inspiration take turns measuring and mixing ingredients to make our pumpkin cinnamon playdough. Sometimes it sure is hard to wait patiently for our turn! Everyone worked well as a team to count out the proper number of scoops we needed for each ingredient.

The letter of the week was U. “Big line down and Scooooooop”. We built U out of play dough, yarn, pumpkin seeds. Letter U for umbrella craft. Our letter recognition is improving! They like to show me letters they see in everyday objects, ie; two markers were laying by each other in the shape of a letter T. Great observation!

October 14th, 2016

Our Fall season seemed to turn into winter this past week! This paved the way to talking about the 4 seasons. We started by listening to some songs about the seasons and brainstorming some of the characteristics of each season. Calgary’s weather does not always follow the seasons like we expect which can make it tricky to figure out what season it is sometimes. 

We spent each day this week briefly learning about each season and how to discriminate between them. For Fall we reviewed the diamond shape by using diamond shaped paper leaves to decorate our fall trees, we explored watercolour paints by painting on a leaf outlined in hot glue.  For Winter we built a snowman outside and then made a snowman craft as well. We also did an ice experiment. What happens when we put hot water and salt on ice, and how long does it take to melt ice with our hands? We had a competition to see who could melt their ice cube the fastest. While melting our ice we also learned that rubbing our hands together really fast creates friction which warms our hands. After our experiment we had some fun melting ice and pouring the water. For Spring, we did an experiment where we used primary colours to make the rainbow. We practiced colour patterns using butterfly stickers, and practiced our cutting skills while making a springtime wine with flowers. For Summer, we made a paper plate sun with sparkling sun rays.

Nosehill Park has been a great place to explore over the last couple days this week. We went through the tunnel, read the map to figure out where we were and where we were going, and went on a hunt for trail markers. On our walk we found a hole in the ground! We talked and figured out that an animal must live there. So we brainstormed the types of animals that live underground, and what size the animal must have been. It was neat to know that there were animals somewhere under us.

Our understanding of information on bar graphs is growing. We marked our favourite season on the bar graph and then counted and compared the amounts each season had. We figured out which had more and which had less.

The letter of the week was “I”. I is a tricky letter because it has two sounds! By the end of the week we were doing a pretty good job identifying which letter I words started with each of the two sounds. We practiced building and writing I using Q-Tips in shaving cream, buttons and our letter construction kit, We also made an I for Icicle craft by dripping white glue and adding sparkles.

October 7th, 2016

Happy Thanksgiving! This weekend was all about giving thanks for the things we have in our lives; especially the things that others may not have. We talked about what it means to be thankful and how other children here and around the world do not have the basic life essentials that we have access to. We are very lucky people.  By tracing and cutting out each of our handprints we creating a wreath of all the things we are thankful for. I heard a very cute but serious conversation between two little ones this week. They were conversing about the fact that people in this world do not have food to eat, and they told each other that they each had food and they were lucky.

Making different types of turkey crafts were a lot of fun this week! We made a play dough turkey using feathers, pipe cleaners and a popsicle stick. We also made finger puppet turkeys and learned about the diamond (or rhombus) shape to make the feathers of a paper turkey. 

In keeping with the Thanksgiving theme we worked in pairs and used feathers to create a colour pattern, and to practice number counting and matching puzzles. Our Thanksgiving picture match game was a lot of fun as well. We also worked on our fine motor skills; tracing and cutting lines. Our scissor skills have increased in the past month. Scissors are a lot of fun to use!

It worked out perfectly that our letter this week was T. T for TURKEY! T is also for tulip, in the T for Tulip craft we did. We used Mat Man pieces, play dough and our bodies to build T in the upper and lower case form. We also used our letter construction kit to not only build the letter T but to also explore putting the pieces together to make different letters, numbers and even some neat looking designs. We brainstormed words that start with letter T and our ability to hear beginning letter sounds in words is increasing. :)

Our Hopping Corn science experiment was one of the highlights this week. We liked it so much we had to do it twice! We worked in pairs to measure and pour ingredients into a jar (water, baking soda, food colouring, corn kernels and vinegar) and watched the kernels hop up and down in the water. They had little gas bubbles that surrounding them (I was told that made them look like a hedgehog) to make them do this.

We continue to practice our CALM yoga as part of our routine. We have been focusing on the “lets be wise and kind” parts; using our words to tell others how we feel, keeping our hands to ourselves, etc. I had one little boy say to me that he told a little girl that he did not want her to do something she was doing and she listening. It was apparent that that made him feel very good. He had the look of amazement and a smile on his face.

Some other things we did this week include; going on a colour hunt, using feathers as a tool to paint with and building Mat Man.

This week was the last of our special Me Bag presentations. It was great for us to see and learn a little bit about each other. Next week there will be no special leader days. Leader days will commence again on October 17th.