I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year!

December 16th, 2016

Christmas is coming soon, but it is not the only holiday/celebration around this time of year. This week we learned about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa; where they were first celebrated and in what culture. 

We thought it exciting that Hanukkah starts on Christmas Eve! We learned that Hanukkah is celebrated for 8 days because there was a special oil lamp that lasted for 8 days without going out. The amount of candles on the menorah reflects this. Each of the 8 candles is lit using the helper candle in the middle. After learning about this oil lamp we did a science experiment using water, oil and salt. We wanted to see what would happen when oil is poured into water, and what would happen when salt was drizzled on top. It was neat watching the salt bring bits of the oil down below the water briefly then bubble back up to the top. We compared Christmas gift giving to Hanukkah gift giving. Children usually receive a gift on each of the 8 days as opposed to Christmas where gifts are usually given all in the same day. During Hanukkah children like to play the Dreidel game. We learned how to spin the dreidel and identify each symbol on it’s four sides. The dreidel game was a great way to practice our counting, splitting amounts of coins in half to make two piles, following game rules and understanding that it is okay not to win. After the Dreidel game we painted the Dreidel symbols and explored colour mixing.

For Kwanzaa we danced along with Elmo to traditional African American music and learned about some of the principles of Kwanzaa that are celebrated during each of the 7 days. These principles teach you how to live a good life. The Kenorah represents the seven days of Kwanzaa; three candles are red, three are green and one is black. We created a paper collage using these here colours.

During these holidays, much like Christmas, they are most importantly about being with family.

We also used part of this past week to continue our learning about recycling. We made our own paper from newspapers. Everyone did a great job tearing the newspapers into tiny pieces and squishing the excess water from the paper pulp using a pop can. We also did some creative building/art using recycled tin cans, boxes, toilet paper tubes, and a lot of tape. We learned that tape worked a little bit better than glue.

On one of our Special Leader days there was a balloon included. We explored static electricity by rubbing the balloon on our heads and laughing as we saw everyone’s hair go up and down. We also rubbed our feet on the carpet and touched our friends to feel a little shock. It was too funny!

Some other things we did this week include; a B for butterfly craft, played vowel identification games and baked muffins.

December 2nd, 2016

This week was all about identifying and exploring our 5 senses. We built patterns using pictures of the 5 senses and matched the senses to the part of the body they are on.

Sense of Sight
We played I Spy, made glitter art by using glue and glitter and played a game in partners where we had to mirror what each other were doing.

Sense of Hearing
We played Freeze Dance, where everyone had to listen for the actions they had to do and then stop when I said Freeze! We also played a game where everyone had to try and remember what action was associated to each sound, and perform that action. Using our sense of hearing we deciphered sounds of animals, machines and people.

Sense of Taste
Do these containers hold the same thing? By looking and smelling, how can you tell? We tasted and there was a definite difference between salt and sugar! Some of us were a bit shocked when tasting the salt after the sugar.

What better way to explore our sense of taste than to do some baking. Everyone is doing really well remembering the job eggs have in our baking why we do not eat this particular raw dough (as it contains raw eggs).

Sense of Smell
We had to smell each cotton pad and match it to the ingredient. We were particularly trying to smell the difference between hot and sweet things. A couple people have some really good sniffers! We also glued "Christmas snowflakes" and sprayed these snowflakes with an essential oil that smells like cinnamon/ginger/pine.

Sense of Touch
Just like for our Mystery Bag's these past few weeks, we had to feel what was inside different boxes without looking and use describing words to figure out what it may be. We had sticky, bumpy, smooth, pokey, soft and fluffy as some of our describing words. Hmmm it's tricky to figure out what's inside this box. After our touch exploration we dumped out the box with paper clips in it and tried to figure out how to make them attach together. This was not an easy task, but with some perseverance they got it!

We had a lot of fun with the letter J this week. We made a J is for Jellyfish craft and built J with buttons and with play dough, which proved to be a bit tricky because it had lines and a curve that is hard to remember the correct direction it turns. Feathers were a fun way to build the letter J and explore our sense of touch at the same time.

Some other things we did this week include, playing with buttons and play dough, and squished paint inside a plastic bag to make our own writing bags.