Christmas Party!

We had a great time at the General Amherst Christmas Party today! Thank you to all our wonderful families who volunteered and came with us! It was a very pretty December day for a walk - sunny and crisp.

We decorated and enjoyed eating some cookies!

We made reindeer food!

Danced to Christmas music!

Made holiday crafts!

What a great time! 

Creating with Cardboard

Mrs. Bombardier invited the children to explore an assortment of recycled cardboard at the art table. It was so interesting to see how they worked with the material and what they created.

Many children created parking garages and car ports for use at our building center.

There was lots of great math talk as the children explored how to make the structures stable and how to ensure that the supports were of equal lengths so the structures were level.

Working with the thick cardboard proved to be a challenging fine motor task for the children too! Great for strengthening hand strength!

It was wonderful to see the children helping each other out and co-creating structures together!

At the end of play time we encouraged the children who created at the art table to share their recycled structures with the rest of the class. What a great way to encourage creativity, cooperation, and recycling! Why don't you try this at home with your children over the holidays?

Empowering Children at Sign In Time

When children enter the classroom in the morning, they have many responsibilities to help empower them and foster independence and sense of self. One way of doing this is to ask children to 'sign in'. Not only is it daily name writing practice, it's a great way to help children see themselves as capable readers and writers, as they figure out the question or problem of the day and response to it. Lately we've been asking the children to author the question of the day. Some are even eager to help us write it!

We love any chance we can get to empower children's literacy and help them see themselves as capable readers, writers, and communicators!

Paper Carton Stamping

We had a number of extra paper cartons in the classroom and invited the children to explore stamping and painting with them. We cut the cartons into fourths and the children chose what colours of paint to use.

The children were delighted to see that the cartons left equally spaced dots on their papers when stamped! 

Many children were interested in stamping in straight lines, some exploring patterning as well!

Other children were interested in swirling and layering the paint, using the cartons as mixing tools.

This created some interesting new colours and textures on the paper.

Other children decided to layer and sweep the paint on the paper with the cartons.

This left some very unusual prints on the top of the thickly painted paper. How neat!