Friday, December 9, 2011

Salt Dough Ornaments

An easy baking activity to do this time of year is salt dough ornaments.  We invited the children to help us make and bake these today. The recipe is easy and you can make more at home! All you need is 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of salt, and 3/4 cup of water. Knead the dough and add small amounts of water and flour at a time until a smooth, easy to use consistency is reached. It should not be too dry or too sticky.


Once we had created an easy-to-use batch of dough, we invited the children to make ornaments using an assortment of Christmas shaped cookie cutters.





It was wonderful for us to see the children helping each other!


Some children demonstrated leadership by taking over the center and running it for us - handing out the dough, helping to roll and cut the ornaments, and writing the names of children next to their ornaments so they didn't get mixed up while baking.


The ornaments baked for 2 hours at 250 degrees. Once they had cooled, the children painted them with holiday colours of acrylic paint. We added some sparkles too!





Lovely!

Ten Little Snowmen Shared Reading

Families,

Your child will be bringing home his or her blue shared reading duotang tonight. We have been practising the poem Ten Little Snowmen together.  Here are two fun websites that compliment this poem that you might like to check out with your child.  Happy reading!

Ten Little Snowmen Animated Book

Build a Virtual Snowman

Thursday, December 8, 2011

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! 

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

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?

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