Ms. Gikov's Kinder "garden" Learning Environment: A recap of the past 2 months..

I am terribly sorry that I wasn't able to post any school related pictures. Fortunately, as of last week I have been informed that I can continue updating the blog, so great news! So much has happened since the beginning of September, so I will do my best and try not to miss any major events.

A clock inquiry sparked an interest back in November, when a child brought in a hand made clock, using a toilet paper roll and some construction paper. We found that more and more children were beginning to show an interest in time and clocks. We had many families working with their children at home on designing and labelling a clock to bring in and show the class. Needless to say, we were SO proud of the creations brought to us. We began to review the parts of the clock as a class and used a cut and paste activity to label a paper one. Then the children made their own:

We brought out some counters to sort and play with:

During centre time, some of the children took out the magnetic letters to use on the white board:

Ordering the numbers:

One of our students traced this haunted house and so, we decided as a class to make a collaborative Halloween display of what we called "The Spooky Town".. many of the students contributed to painting it and adding ghosts, a moon, haunted houses, and streets onto it.

This particular student wanted to make a pop-up house!!!

Working together:

Making ghost faces:

And then making an apple out of playdough for the tree:

Decorating our Halloween playdough mats:

During the spirit of Halloween, we noticed that the children were particularly interested in skeletons. So, we took the opportunity to look up different kinds of skeletons; human, bird, dinosaur, dog and cat ones. This lead us to research how many bones are in our body. We discovered that there are 206 bones in the human skeleton!!! Then we guessed how many bones were in the other skeletons and looked them up to see if we were close. After many discussions, some of the students asked if they could draw skeletons, so we printed off some for them to trace and label.

Our skeleton display:

An interactive game requiring the children to assemble to skeleton, placing each bone in the correct spot:

We even tried to make our own bones our of playdough for our sand table, so we could pretend to be archeologists:

and arm bone:

We carved a pumpkin and separated the pulp from the seeds. We counted the seeds and washed them in a strainer so we could use them later on for a project!

And then finally the day arrived!!
This was us on Halloween all dressed up!!

The girls playing in the block centre, building a jewel store:

Building a castle together:

Building a bridge:

We took a walk outside on a nice day with paper bags to fill. We were specifically looking for small twigs/branches and leaves on the ground to make our own tree Art. This is what came of it:

Empting out our bags:

Placing our found materials where we wanted them to go:

The finished product:

Then we dyed some pumpkin seeds and used those to resemble the leaves on the trees:

Here are some yellow seeds:

And red ones:

While the children were observing the beautiful fall colours on the trees and discussing them, we decided to collect some outside and do a graphing lessons on the different types of leaf colours we saw:

We tallied them up and used math language to talk about which colour had the most leaves and which colour had the least.

We also did something very exciting this year!! We made some apple crisp: using fresh apples from Ms. Firoz (next doors) apple tree:

It made out room smell delicious!!

A group of students participated in a fun colour sorting activity that required a lot of creativity and good painting skills. We used 6 blank canvases and painted them each a different colour. Then we collected random objects from around our classroom and glued them onto our canvases to represent that colour.