July 8th, 2016

Cheetahs don’t roar; did you know? We learned that the cheetah is the fastest running wild cat. It can run faster than cars can drive! Some of us were convinced that we could out run a cheetah, but after seeing a real cheetah run we quickly changed our minds. Why do cheetahs run so fast? They have to catch their food, and their bodies are built in a special way to allow this. It was neat to see a computer generated image of a cheetah running, so we could see the muscles and the bones of the cheetah as it runs. We then made our own cheetahs using paper tubes, and coloured paper. The faces drawn on the cheetahs were quite cute and funny; they were angry because they didn’t run fast enough to catch any food.

Tigers have stripes, not spots! Surprisingly the tiger was one of the hardest wild cats to remember! We made tiger puppets using paper bags, coloured paper, pipe cleaners and googly eyes.

We went on a wild cat scavenger hunt and after finding them we figured out which cats there were more or less of. We also learned the names of different wild cat, matched their images and journalled about our favourite one from the bunch. Our patterning is coming more easily to us now. We practiced our AB and AAB patterning this week using images of wild cats.

We learned that you can tell the difference between a male and female lion by looking to see if the it has a mane or not. We made lions out of paper plates and tissue paper; making a boy and a girl. Pretending to be lions hunting their prey "cantaloupe" (antelope), zebras and water buffalo was a lot of fun too!

Pretending to be lions on a hunt was just one of the fun things we did outside this week. Sidewalk chalk drawing was quite popular this week. We did it 3 times! There was some great number writing practice happening with the drawing of a hop scotch, and drawings are getting far more detailed.  Using our imaginary ball and bat, we played some pretend baseball. When that ball was hit, boy did we run hard! We also investigated the outdoors with magnifying glasses.
 
Some other things we did this week include; building our names with buttons in play dough and matched words with their word family by throwing a word ball into the appropriate word family cup for example: "at" words go into the "at" cup, and "op" words in the "op" cup.
 
See you next week!
Xoxo Miss Audra