November 25th, 2016

“Brown Bear Brown Bear What do you see?” Eric Carle’s story was a great way to start our bear investigation. After reading the story we played an I Spy type game where one person picked what the entire group was searching for on an I Spy bottle quilt. It would begin when the group said “Brown Bear Brown Bear What do you see?” and then one person would say “I See a (insert object being spied) looking at me!”. It was cute watching them play this game by themselves at other points in the day.

We talked about the many different types of bears; mainly the Grizzly bear, Black bear, Polar bear and Panda bear. We discussed what makes them different from one another ie: colour, size, where they live and what they eat. We made our own brown paint, then painted a Grizzly bear on a paper plate. We also used our homemade paint with a fork as a painting utensil to add texture to our Polar bear painting.

Did you know that bears hibernate? We were imagining what it would be like to sleep for so long. We created a bear’s den mural by pasting black paper for the inside of the cave and crumpling craft paper for the outside
We had a very special 4th birthday celebration this week. And what better way to celebrate than by baking cookies, singing happy birthday and going on a bear hunt…well a stuffy bear hunt. We listened to a reading of “We’re going on a bear hunt” by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, and performed actions to go along with the story. We made toilet paper tube binoculars and went on our way. We searched for bear paw prints all the way to a stuffy bear cave outside. We found bunch of teddy bears in there! It was really cute to see this bear hunt turn into a game at the park, with a couple people hunting for the bears, chanting “We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day. We’re not scared.”.

Some other things we did this week include; sponge painting, letter construction, tried to find as many bears in our stuffy basket as we could so we could count and compare the sizes and moved to the chant “Teddy bear teddy bear turn around, teddy bear teddy bear touch the ground” (great for rhyming, and following instructions. Everyone had a turn to shout out an action.).

Our letter this week was S. Not only did we make an S is for snowman craft, and practiced building the letter, but thought of close to 70 S words! We almost couldn’t fit anymore words on the board. We have also been playing a vowel game this week where we would write our names and other words on the board and then erase the vowels with the big eraser to see what the word would sound like with no vowels in it. We learned how important vowels are. If we didn’t have them are words would not sound very good.
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We have now wrapped up our Mystery Bag special leader days. Everyone is getting really good at using describing words, when not being able to see an object. We can tell the difference between what is soft and hard (and bumpy, smooth, scratchy, pointy, gooey, sticky, etc) as well as identifying size and shape (which can be quite tricky when an object can be built with many shapes). It was very interesting to hear them describe what they felt in relation to their handwriting terms (i.e.: big line) or things in nature (i.e.: stick). Great job everyone!

November 18th, 2016
We had a lot of fun this week singing and doing actions to some of our favourite nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes are a great way to develop language skills at an early age. They are fun to sing, help build vocabulary, help children to hear sounds in words and break sounds into syllables among other things.

Each day we explored a different nursery rhyme. First we sang and danced the actions to “I’m a Little Teapot”. What a great job everyone did memorizing the song and the actions! We had a tea party in the afternoon of which we had to bake treats, wash the dishes, set the table, learn how to prepare the tea and have a wonderful time. What a great afternoon practicing our collaborative skills, measuring and counting skills, practicing our patience and taking turns, as well as how to wash dishes well. 

Our second nursery rhyme was “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. This song led us to talking about what rhyming words are and what rhymes with snow and go (words in the rhyme). Some of us came up with quite a few i.e.; snow, go, no, bow, row. We used cotton balls to make our own wooly lambs, as well as to represent numbers.

Our third nursery rhyme was “Itsy Bitsy Spider”. This rhyme is a great song to do finger play actions to. We hugged our thumbs together and pretended our fingers were spider legs. Tricky tricky!  We explored this rhyme further with some water play where we used little spiders and funnels in the water. We also used our little hands to roll play dough into a ball and push in pipe cleaner legs and google eyes to make our own spider.

Our fourth nursery rhyme was “Row Row Row Your Boat”. We sat across from a partner, touched our feet together and held our hands to pull each other back and forth as we sang the song. This was supposed to mimic the movement of rowing a boat. What a bunch of fun! We folded origami boats and put them in water to see if they would float or sink. They float! Although, we learned that if our boat had a little hole in it or if the boat stayed in water for an extended period of time it would get quite soggy. Then we added a bit of weight with little toy people. We discovered that you cannot put one toy person on one end of the boat without it taking on water, so we had to even out the weight by putting one person on each side of the boat or putting just one person in the middle of the boat.

Our fifth and final nursery rhyme was “Pop! Goes the Weasel”. This rhyme was the most tricky, as most of us had never heard it before. Everyone tried so hard to remember the words. Of course our favourite part of the rhyme was the Pop! part; we crouched down, sang the rhyme and as soon as we got to the Pop! part we jumped up as high as we could go. I think we must have done that about 20 times in a row!

We had a lot of fun with our nursery rhymes this week and can’t wait for next week!

November 10th, 2016

It is a time to remember. Peace around the world and in our classroom community was the topic this week. What does it mean to be peaceful? One of our favourite peace songs this week has been “I’ve got peace in my fingers” by Susan Salidor. It was a great way to reinforce that using our words to solve problems is more kind than using our hand in a physical way. We related this towards the wars that are and have been happening around the world; and we understood these wars as people not using their words to talk about their problems but instead using violence. As we learned and are learning, violence does not solve our problems but only makes them worse. 

The discussion about soldiers and their role in wars came up as well. Not all soldiers are “bad”. Some soldiers, like Canadian soldiers, are peacekeepers. We talked about the role of a peacekeeper, and why they still have guns even though they are not “bad guys”. It was quite the in depth conversation.

To commemorate our soldiers we wrote ways to be peaceful on a paper poppy. What great printing! They have been practicing so hard. Here are some examples of ways we thought we could be peaceful; sharing, using our manners, playing together nicely, being kind towards others, using your words to solve problems instead of your hands, shaking hands with others, saying thank you, etc.

We also created a finger painted mural of poppies and used our pincher fingers to tear paper to make individual paper poppies. It was also fun to paint our own hands so we could use our collective handprints to make a poppy wreath.

We have been so lucky to have had nice weather recently, so we have been spending as much time outside as possible. We went on an adventure to exchange coins for poppies. Everyone took such care of there coins on the way there. We talked about what a poppy is why we wear them, why we donate money and where the money goes. You could see the sense of responsibility they felt towards keeping their money safe so they could give it to the poppy fund. After we received our poppies we went to a lovely nature spot where the kids got to explore their balancing, climbing, crouching and crawling skills. We also took a few small rocks to paint.

Letter Q was our letter this week. Magic C, turn it into an O and give it a tail! Everyone has been working so hard on their letter formation, and are choosing to practice on paper and on the whiteboard in their free time. It’s great to see!

November 4th, 2016

What a fun time Halloween can be! We dressed up for our Halloween celebration and played a few fun games! A couple little ones were turned into mummies (No, not the mommies they first understood mummies to be! Too cute!), we all took many turns climbing through a spider web obstacle course, and searched through pumpkin pulp to find tiny little spiders. These were all great ways to exercise our fine and gross motor skills; unraveling and tucking in toilet paper to wrap our friends, using our coordination and balance to make it through the obstacle course, and using our pincher fingers to pick and pull out tiny spiders from a cauldron of pulp. Our spider search was also a fun way to practice our counting and comparing number amounts.

After our Halloween celebration, I could not believe that it was already November! Where have these past two months gone? These little ones understanding of their own and others feelings have grown tremendously; our empathy for others is beginning to increase. They are often remembering to positively ask for the things they need and desire. And they are being bucket fillers by helping each other out without being asked i.e. picking up each other’s dropping items. What a great two months of growth it has been! I am very impressed.

We took the time this week to talk about Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. By exploring a map, we figured out where India was, and compared it to where in the world we are, and how one could get from here to there. Many wanted to see where their houses were, so it was neat being able to zoom in on the map to find exact addresses. They were quite amazed and a bit puzzled as to why they could not see their house on the scale of the map; this lead to an interesting conversation about how big the world actually is!

To celebrate Diwali, we danced and attempted to sing a couple Diwali songs even though they were not in English of course. What a great chance to talk about the different types of languages there are around the world, specifically in India and in our very homes. We created folded paper candles to represent the Diya (Dee-Ya) used during the festival. Folding paper in and accordion fashion was tricky but everyone caught on! They also did a great job writing Diwali as well! To keep with the idea that candles create light and are often used to celebrate, we sorting candles into colour groups as well as size groups. We also created a fireworks painting using a toilet paper roll as a stamp. Some beautiful artworks were created!
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What a week of celebration it has been! We also had a very special 4th birthday! Everyone helped to make cupcakes and icing from scratch. Everyone had paid very careful attention to using exact amounts of ingredients; leveling the measuring cups and making sure that measuring cups were completely full before putting them into the bowl. It was so hard to wait for those cupcakes to be done! Everyone spread their own icing as well.
 
This week’s letter was O. Did we ever come up with so many letter O words over the past few days! Did you know that O is a vowel and that means it has two sounds? Vowels make words sound nice too and if there are no vowels in a word it sure does sound funny. We wanted to see what words would sound like without these important vowels, so we decided to take the vowels out of our names. Some people hardly had any letters left in their name!