Electrical Safety

We had an entertaining presentation from Enwin regarding electrical safety around home and the neighbourhood. Why don't you ask your child to share with you some of the ways we learned to stay safe?

Self Portraits

Today we read the big book " In The Mirror" during shared reading time. 

We thought it would be interesting to set up an art provocation for the children and ask them to consider what they saw in their mirror.  

The children were very eager to participate and took some time examining their reflections. This lead to some great conversations about facial features and expressions. 

The children had to carefully select the pastels that best represented their interpretation of what they observed. 

Their attention to detail and enthusiasm for the task were inspiring!

We can't wait to see what other portraits are drawn at this centre for the rest of the week!

Baking Fun!

We had some fun baking sugar cookies in our room today in preparation for next week's holiday get together!

It was an easy recipe that you might want to try at home!

There was much excitement as the children measured, mixed, rolled, and cut out festive cookies. 

We can't wait to try them!

Snow!

The children were so excited to see the large snowflakes that fell this morning! "How many can you catch?" Ms. Jamrog challenged them. They quickly got busy catching and counting the beautiful flakes!

Seasonal Sensory Bin

We invited the children to explore some small seasonal objects in the sensory table. We were curious to see what they would do or create with the new materials. 

The children were very excited and spent much time discussing the characteristics of the objects with each other. 

We heard wonderful descriptors of the materials - shiny, bumpy, smooth, prickly, and glittery. 

The children pretended to wrap presents and give them to each other. 

They even decorated the tiny tree!

So much fun and so great for promoting collaboration and sharing too!

Spider Playscapes

The children have been fascinated with spiders and how they make webs. We have put out a number of spider Playscapes, both inside and outside, in order to encourage the children to dramatize what they are learning about spiders. We are hoping regular handling of the plastic spiders will grow a sense of comfort and respect for spiders next time children find a real one in their house or yard. 

The Big Crunch

We celebrated The Big Crunch today by all eating some apple together at the same time to celebrate healthy eating and eating locally grown food. Many schools participate in this simultaneously across our school board! 

Ready?   1, 2, 3....

CRUNCH!

Natural Weaving

Weaving is a great way to create beautiful art and provide opportunities for children to strengthen fine motor control and hand-eye coordination. We taped chicken wire to old picture frames and provided children with scissors. 

Outside the children were encouraged to find interesting things in nature and cut them for use in their natural weaving. 

They worked together in pairs creating beautiful artwork together. 

This was a challenging task but they stuck with it and the result was a beautiful piece of natural artwork! 

Beautiful!

Colour mixing on the light table

We love using our light table! It is a great tool for exploring art and science materials and concepts. Today we did an old favourite - mixing the primary colours of water using pipettes. I used a clear plastic tray and filled each section with water. Using food colouring I made one yellow, red, and blue section. 

The children were encouraged to mix and explore colour making by combining drops of different colours. 

Not only is it amazing to see what colours emerge, this is a great activity to strengthen fine motor control and hand-eye coordination. 

Beautiful!

Outdoor Finger Painting

Today we found another use for our acrylic outdoor easel! I love to encourage the children to finger paint but sometimes it can get so messy. Instead of using a flat paper surface, we dribbled finger paint on our outdoor acrylic easel.

The paint was thick enough to stay on the acrylic, giving Caleb an interesting surface to paint on. Usually finger painting is done on a horizontal surface, and he seemed to appreciate the challenge of experiencing it done vertically instead!

The sunlight shone through the paint and illuminated it, much like when one finger paints on a light table. It reminded us of beautiful stained glass.

Clean up was easy! We just sprayed it with the hose. Don't have an outdoor acrylic easel? What about trying this on windows? (maybe perform a spot check first...just in case!)