This week was short and sweet. Very sweet!

It was full of excitement as we counted down the final days before Christmas. Within all of the excitement we took the time to think about and consider all of the children in the world that are less fortunate than we are. We all talked about how important it is to be thankful for all of the wonderful gifts we may receive and that spending time with family is most important at this time of year.

Everyone worked very hard this week to create a special gift to give their families. I know they will be treasured for years to come!

Today was our Christmas PJ party (a great way to end our week before the holidays) where we baked and decorated ornaments, danced to Christmas music, played with our friends, went sledding, ate wonderful treats baked by our families and of course wore our PJ’s!

I big thank you to all the families for the thoughtful gifts and treats brought to make our Christmas PJ party special.

I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and I will see you all in the New Year. Stay warm and safe!
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Xoxo Miss Audra

December 11th, 2015

The celebration of Hanukah started this week. We have been discussing how people around the world celebrate different things, in different ways and how anyone is entitled to celebrate anything they believe in.  We spent this week learning about the different ways in which children celebrate Hanukah. We used our hands to create our own Menorah, where we had to count and how many candle flames we needed. We then worked together to create a paper Menorah, with eight candles and a “helper” candle that lights the others, on which we kept track of which day of Hanukah it was. Each day was just as important as the others, in that each day was a day to spend with family. Although children often receive a small gift on each day of Hanukah, that is not what the holidays are about. Because giving is often a part of the holiday season, we decided to make and give a gift to our friends at school and our families. Everyone worked super hard to do their best job possible, not only to create something out of many provided materials but also to sound out and spell the names of the people their gifts were going to.

Children at Hanukah like to celebrate by playing the Dreidal game, where they spin a top like toy and either give or collect coins/candy from each turn. We used paper templates to draw the symbols of the Dreidal, cut it out and piece it together. We used the Dreidal game to help us learn to play by the rules, not to be upset if we lost all of our coins to another (good sportsmanship), and the concept that two halves make a whole (something you can only take half of the coins, so we had to learn how to split them in half). The Dreidal game was a great way to practice our counting!

Elmo taught us how to use the Hebrew word Shalom to say hello to others and everyone worked really hard to grate potatoes to make the common Hanukah dish called Latke. Mmm it was tasty! We also used the word Latke to help us practice the sounds that letters make and to know that sometimes words have letters at the end that you cannot hear.

This week some of noticed that all days of the week end in the letters “DAY”. We took this opportunity to identify, sound out and build these letters. We have also been focusing on how to “read” from left to right, so that the letters we write and the words we read make sense.

This week we added two pieces of winter clothing to our life size paper person; boots and Santa snow pants. We practiced cutting straight and curvy lines, hole punching and threading yarn, as well as tracing and copying letters.

We have now started counting and writing down how many days until Christmas; remembering that teen numbers start with the number one and then listening for the second digit s sound to figure out what number came next. We have a very observant bunch here at Blooming Butterflies… it was noticed that when counting how many days are left until Christmas we were not counting the actual number on that day of the week but rather how many numbers were left until the 25th.

We have now learned about Hanukah. We can’t wait to learn about Kwanzaa!

Xoxo Miss Audra

December 4th, 2015

We are very excited to announce that we had a new friend join Blooming Butterflies this week! We are happy to welcome him to our BB family.

Bunnies, bunnies, bunnies! We continued this week, learning about bunnies and the winter season. We started with bunny footprints last week to asking why bunnies were turning white. This led us to talk about predators and why different animals have the different types of teeth they do. Different types of teeth are good for eating certain types of food. We had an in depth look at our own teeth to see if we have good teeth for eating meat and veggies. Turns out we do!

We now have a life size paper person on our wall that we are continuing to dress for the winter. So far we have mittens and toques. Each article of clothing we are using our tiny fingers to cut, hole punch and thread. Hopefully our paper person will be cozy for the winter weather soon!

 Continuing with theme of winter, we used snow and coloured water to do a science experiment. We had to see what would happen to the snow if we keep adding water to it and also what colour would the snow turn if we used red and blue coloured water. We made purple and our snow melted!

Snowmen are always fun to create but we did not have very much snow this week! We used our fingers and paint to create snowmen. These snowmen had to have a certain number of balls to correspond to the number written on their top hats. Some snowmen were much taller than others; some even started to lean.

There were many things we did this week that helped us practice our math skills. We worked as a team to sort snowflakes and then built size patterns with them. We used number mats to identify, write, trace, represent, and count numbers. To help us practice identifying single digit numbers we went on a walk and took turns reading the numbers on the neighbours’ houses. As a regular part of our outdoors routine, everyone has a turn to count how many people we have before we head back to school. Then we compare the number to yesterdays to see if we have more or less people today.

As a part of our morning routine, we have been recording the weather and the temperature and comparing it to the previous day, as well as continuing to practice identifying the letters and letter sounds in the days of the week. We are starting to identify the beginning sound of the day within the Day of the Week song too! We have also been dancing to the Happy Song. We have such a happy bunch in the morning!

Storytime is always a fun, imaginative time. We have been learning what a title is, practicing how to predict what will happen next by looking at a picture and reading the images within the book to create the story. It is really sweet to see them read like this to each other.

A few of the other activities we have done this week include; writing letters in a salt tray and on playdough letter mats, identifying shapes and letters within the shapes words, painting using cardboard stamps, creating cotton ball bunnies and sequencing the letters of the alphabet using letter blocks.

See everyone tomorrow!

Xoxo Miss Audra