We had a very special third birthday to celebrate this week! We counted down the days until his birthday on Friday. It was so hard to wait that long! The look on his face when we sang Happy Birthday was the sweetest. He couldn’t stop saying “thank- you everyone”. Whenever a birthday comes around we all enjoy baking cupcakes to celebrate. Baking is a great way to learn about numbers and measurements, being patient and taking turns. In the middle of our day we were very fortunate to meet new friends at the park who let us borrow their sleds. We had so much fun. What a great day!

With the past few snowfalls we have grown a sudden interest in footprints; particularly the footprints of rabbits, as there definitely is no shortage of them. We now know that rabbits’ footprints create a unique print in groups of four. We counted how many footprints we have in comparison and traced and cut out these prints. Wow! Rabbits changing colour to match the snow in the winter amazed us, and who knew they lived in burrows in the ground? We do now!

Not only have we been fascinated with rabbits but we have also taken notice of icicles that are forming outside when we are at the park. We decided to try and make our own icicles, or crystals, using Epsom salt and water. It has been amazing to see them slowly grow over the past couple days. Can’t wait to see what they will look like next week!

We definitely love to paint here at Blooming Butterflies! We froze coloured ice cubes to paint with. How can we paint with ice cubes? Melt the ice cubes of course! We used our hands to warm them up and colours started to drip. With red and blue ice cubes we also learned that purple is the resulting colour.

Because we love painting so much we also decided to try making a batch of our very own gooey “snow paint”. The expressions on their faces when they touched it were too funny! We then used our 5 senses to learn about this snow paint. “It smells like playdough.” “I can’t hear it.” “It’s white and gooey.” “Eww, it feels gross.” Yuck! It tastes bad!” Not to worry, snow paint is edible.

For art this week we made glitter snowflakes using popsicle sticks. We learned that not a single snowflake looks the same as another. We made marshmallow snowmen; tracing the circles of a snowman with glue and marshmallows. Pan loved our artwork so much that he decided he would eat a couple marshmallows from everyone’s completed artwork, glue and all. Silly cat!

All week long we have been working on an art experiment. We glued yarn threads to a blown up balloon, let it dry and popped them to see what would happen. As the balloon lost air it sucked the glued yarn inwards and the glue sounded like Rice Krispies. But after the balloon was taken out the yarn went back to the shape of the balloon. Neat.

To practice our writing this week, in addition to using our crayons, we build the letters of our name using snowflakes. We are getting better at being able to now copy our names using objects and without using our name tags to follow on top of. We also used our name to build a snowman. Each letter had its’ own ball of the snowman. Turns out that everyone here that day had five letters in their name. We have also been playing a board game every day this week that helps us distinguish the difference between lower and upper case letters. Everyone is doing a wonderful job remembering what different letters are called!

Some of the things we have been doing this week in for math include snowball counting, counting on the abacus, building images with shapes and shape matching Dominoes.

I look forward to seeing everyone again soon! And to hear all about the third birthday party that took place this weekend.

Xoxo Miss Audra

November 20th, 2015

Snow Snow Snow! Winter is coming. This week was all about the season of Winter. Many questions were asked including where does snow come from? How come it is cloudy when it snows? And How is ice made? Quite the inquisitive minds we have here.

What will happen to water that we put in the fridge? What will happen to water that we put in the freezer? We placed beads into ice cube trays, filled them with water and placed one in the fridge and freezer. Everyone made a prediction about what might happen to the water. Some of us were surprised to see that the beads became frozen in ice in the freezer, but nothing happened to the ones in the fridge. Next, we had to figure out how to get the beads out of the ice! There were three things we could use; hot water, salt and our hands. We explored these options to find out which one melted the ice the fastest and which melted the slowest. Boy were our hands chilly after this!

Now everyone is fascinated with ice; finding it on the playground, watching it melt in our tea to cool it down and even noticing that “sidewalk salt” melts ice outside in a very similar way to the salt we used to melt ice inside.

We keep track of the weather everyday but have now also been recording the temperature on our thermometer number scale. We know that the numbers above the zero are warmer and the numbers below the zero are colder. The colder numbers are also called minus numbers. What a fun way to count forwards and backwards, while learning about temperature at the same time. As a side note; we have also been learning how to use an abacus to help us count.

In addition to the thermometer counting each day, we have been counting with snowballs (cotton balls). We have to read the number and put the corresponding amount of snowballs beside it. Sometimes we use numbers with dots to help us to figure out what the number is called.

To go along with our winter theme everyone has worked really hard at creating many wonderful crafts that focus on our fine motor skills, following instructions and just having some fun!  We created winter paintings using marshmallows, Q-tips and paint. Squeezing glue to make lines and circles for our glitter snowflakes was tough work for our hand and arm muscles; producing some very sparkly snowflakes. We all thought it would be important to make a craft about the types of clothing we have to wear outside in the winter, since it is different than summer, so we practiced cutting out paper mittens, hole punching them afterwards and threading yarn through the holes. The intense concentration I saw on their faces was really cute.

In the spirit of winter, we used white fluffy stuff (shaving cream) to practice writing the letters of our name. A ton of fun and a ton of mess!

We have been reading Dr. Seuss stories and have noticed that some words sound the same; rhyming words! Particular words noticed were all, ball and fall. And then the funniest thing happened; a prediction of what might happen to the main character who was trying to balance many things above his head was made and it sounded like this “I think the ball will fall!”. We had a bit of a laugh when we noticed that this prediction rhymed.

To help us with our letter recognition we have been working as a team to sequence letter blocks to match the alphabet that we sing. We have also been working very hard at spelling words that we build in our puzzles. I was proud to see that there were some words spelled this week without any assistance! Even if they couldn’t get the proper letter they sure gave it a shot.

Can’t wait to see what lays ahead for next week!

Xoxo Miss Audra

November 13th, 2015

This week was all about peace and remembering those who helping to keep our country safe. We learned about what Peace means, who peacekeepers are and how we can create peace within our school, family and on a wider scale. The favourite song this week was called “Peace in my fingers”; where we learned to have peace in our fingers (not to use ours hands on anyone), words in our head (using our words to communicate our feelings and come to a solution), and love in our hearts (have a positive attitude and be caring towards others). This song has such a positive impact on everyone this week. There were a number of times where I heard some tell another that they had to have peace, to not get mad, and then the next thing you know any sort of conflict they were having was over. It was truly wonderful to see.

We went on an adventure to find a store that had a poppy box. We took very good care of our donation along the way so we could pop it into the box ourselves. It was a very proud moment for them to give a donation and to wear the poppy that they have been learning so much about.

Our large art project this week was a mural of Flanders Fields. We read the poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae to learn what Flanders Fields was and what was there. Poppies were created by gluing together black squares and red circles; we counted 23! Rulers were introduced as a tool to create straight lines to cut rectangles for the crosses. We learned that the crosses had to be glued on our mural in rows, so we all counted 3 crosses to put in our own straight line. What a great job everyone did!

One of the highlights of the week was baking our very own poppy cookies. We compared amounts of measured ingredients to see which had more or less, and were introduced to the idea that two halves make a whole. Everyone was responsible for measuring and mixing two or three ingredients. We are getting increasingly better at listening to instructions for measuring and taking turns pouring their ingredients into the bowl.

Speaking of listening to and following instructions; we have been moving and following instructions to the action song “Move and Freeze” by the Learning Station. Sometimes there are some tricky multi-step actions that involve team work and hand-eye coordination. Following instructions is quite tricky when there are multiple instructions at one time.

Some of the other things we did this week include; writing the word Peace using stickers, made the letters of our names using poppies, wrote our names in the snow and used scissors independently to cut out large paper poppies. We used the Flanders Fields poem as the black centre for that poppy.

What a wonderful week of peace.

See everyone next week!

Xoxo Miss Audra

Remembrance Day is right around the corner. We revisited the topic of being thankful for the things we have in our lives, because many people are not so lucky. We learned what Remembrance Day is and why it is important to remember those who keep/kept our country safe. Charlie Brown showed us that poppies grew where soldiers died, and that a man named John McCrae wrote a famous poem where those poppies blew.

We created many art works to represent poppies and war. Painted pumpkin seeds were used to create poppies. In order to make these poppies we had to put the pumpkin seeds into groups of four, so each poppy could have four petals. Finger painted poppies were also created.

Did you know that colours can make you feel different things? “War” paintings we created with the idea that black could represent being scared and a bit sad and red could mean anger.

We talked about what a veteran is and wrote a letter to say thank you. We sure are grateful for all our veterans have done to keep our country safe and help others.

This week we re-visited Mat Man and used mirrors to look for details to add to our self-portraits. The process and final product turned out very well. Great attention to details!

We are practicing how to listen effectively to instructions by moving to songs that have specific directions. Did you know it is quite difficult to put you hand on your head and the other on a partners knee and walk in circles?! Everyone did a great job!

In the kitchen, we are learning how to use knives in a safe manner and how to cut effectively. We used knives with bright coloured handles to see where the best place to hold a knife is and practiced holding the food so our fingers don’t get in the way.

Some of the other things we have done this week include; writing our names using paint on the end of a Q-Tip, used Big and Little lines to create some upper case letters, playing a game called Graveyard to see if we can make our friends laugh, counted the number of objects in a puzzles final image to see which object there were more or less of, and created our own process art using pipe cleaners, toilet paper tubes, egg cartons with holes in them, scissors and glue.

See everyone next week!

Xoxo Miss Audra

October 30th, 2015

Halloween is here! What’s more fun than dressing up in costumes and celebrating with your friends?! We had a fireman, a ballerina, Elsa and Anna. We had a Halloween dance party, baked cupcakes and climbed through a human spider web.

Following the Halloween theme this week, we created many crafts that tested our fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination and counting. We made Jack O Lantern faces using shapes we are learning about and then we punched holes in the tops of them and threaded yarn through them to create garland. We counted how many legs a spider has and then chose the corresponding number of pipe cleaners to poke through and egg carton. We practiced our cutting skills making bat wings for our toilet paper tube bat.

Who knew that you could paint with something other than a paint brush…toothbrushes and Q-Tips are great for painting as well. We painted on a squashes 3D surface which it quite different than painting on paper. It is always fun to learn to use new tools when performing a familiar task. Keeps our minds working!

Cleaning out the pumpkins this week was a fun and dirty job. Some jumped right into the gooey mess and some preferred to watch. No matter how much our hands were involved, we still learned so much about our 5 senses. There were mixed reviews about the smell of the pumpkins.

“Ewww it smells like mud” and “Mmm candy”.

Some of us wanted to taste the pumpkin and were not very pleased that it didn’t taste like the candy they smelled. Their faces were priceless. We even listened to the sound a pumpkin has when someone is scrapping out the seeds and pulp. It was quite fascinating.

After the pumpkin scooping we washed and counted the pumpkin seeds. We first estimated which pumpkin we thought would have more seeds inside; one pumpkin was bigger than the other so that one must have more right? We then wanted to see how many lines of pumpkin seeds we could make, 15!

Tiny Halloween creatures were quite the hit this week. We used tiny spiders and googly eyes to count, write our names and of course play with!

We continued using our pumpkin song to identify emotions and practice counting. This week we used our emotion pumpkins to add. We also learned a new movement song called “Dem Bones”. It is a skeleton song that helps us to identify parts of our bodies, as well as our left from right. Super fun!

Happy Halloween!

Xoxo Miss Audra