Monday, March 30, 2015

Without the rain, there would never be rainbows!

April is just around the corner and we have been talking about all of the changes that are about to happen in this new season. Although these past few weeks haven't necessarily felt like Spring weather, we know what to expect in the coming weeks. We had a discussion around new beginnings and what changes take place. We worked on a cute little art piece of a baby chick hatching, to represent the beginning of a new life. Here is some of the wonderful work we have been doing:






Ms. Buckworth also taught the students how to draw beautiful flowers, using pastels. She hung them outside of our classroom and it looks like a colourful garden in the hallway :)
We played this ice cream scoop game, where the scoops of ice cream which had a letter on it, had to be matched to the word and then said out loud:
Our sight word match game had a similar concept, only it got the children moving around to try to find others who had letters to make the word at the top of their card. They loved it and wanted to play a second time after introducing it!
We love our reading area!!
 
This week is a short week, as Friday we have no school because it is Good Friday.
 
Tomorrow is our assembly and Fancy Shmancy Day!!
 
Have a wonderful week :o)

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Children see magic because they look for it. -Christopher Moore

Bringing this parachute out during Gym time brought back so many childhood memories. To see the expression and excitement on the kids faces was priceless. For some, it was the first time they had ever seen or got to experience all of the fun games you can play with it, like POPCORN!
These were some of the buildings we made during Art class with Ms. Buckworth using newspaper, sharpie markers, stickers and black construction paper.
 The boys continued to build cities during centre time.
 While our city inquiry group was challenged to label the drawings they made to add to our city.
The girls made a big bedroom. They described different areas as: "This is a computer and makeup box." "And a beautiful bedroom." "And a G-tar and toys. " "Yup! And a cup and we have a whole city and a butterfly blanket." "And a picture." "We have lots of things in our bedroom!" "And lots of pictures of us." "And don't you forget a closet!" "We have lots of things!" "And a sparkly microphone for me."
 Of course we needed a gas station! This was a great addition to our city!
 And also- a train!! Amazed by this drawing, done all on his own by looking at a picture.
 Some of the children make use of the lists we brainstorm as a class. They go over to the board, write down their idea and bring it back to the table to work on.
 Some more beautiful buildings!
 The boys, working together to put together the pieces of a police man puzzle.
 She is working on drawing a dentist!
 A cruise ship!! It even has an anchor at the side! How creative :)
These children were working together to create a marble maze in our water table, so that we don't loose all the marbles!
 It took team effort to do, but they did it!
These boys drew pictures of every piece they used to make their objects and kept track of how many they used, in case someone else in our class wanted to make the same thing.
 Artists at work!
 With a little support, even out JK's were able to do it.
 She wanted to create her own city alphabet letter hunt.. So she drew each letter, cut them out and hid them all over the room. Then, she created this chart so that her classmates could keep track of the letters they found. They had so much fun doing this!
 Then she came up with a great idea to help the boys build their city. Why not add some stoplights?! Using the coloured blocks, they made their own.
We discussed many ideas of what we could turn our dramatic play centre into. Then we took all of the ideas that the children gave us, and created a graph, where each child got to select the picture of the store they wanted and place it onto our graph.
 
The ice cream parlour won!! So, we quickly got to work. Before we could open the store, we had to make the ice cream, signs and menus.
 We had all different kinds of flavours; strawberry, chocolate, vanilla, blueberry, and mint.
 Then we left them out to dry in our hand made cones.
 This is what it started to look like:
 Then we started to put out some toppings for our ice cream.
 "Here Ms. Gikov, I brought you some ice cream!"
We will continue our play when we get back from the break with more of a focus on the cost of ice cream and how to accept and give back money like real customers and store owners do.
 
Hope everyone is enjoying their March break!! :) It is finally starting to feel a little more like Spring!