What happens when the sun comes out on a winter day??..

..the snow melts away!!

The children in our class have been fascinated with the idea that a solid piece of snow or ice can transform into water. They have been asking us everyday if they can put some in a bucket or cup and bring it inside to observe what happens. We watched a YouTube video about Sneezy the snowman and how when he gets to close to anything warm, he melts away.

I then found a great follow up activity on primary pack's BlogSpot that we used with the children. We mixed these two ingredients together and anticipated what was going to happen:

We took a paintbrush and mixed them together to get a foam like paste and painted a melting snowman on the blue template paper to show as an example. It even dried that way!

This was a lot of fun!

Some of the children said that it looks like marshmallows. Some commented on the smell of the shaving cream, saying that it smelled like flowers. For the most part, it was all left in the hands of the creator because each one turned out so differently and unique. They enjoyed cutting out the parts of the snowman as well and sticking them wherever they liked.

We notice that surveys are still being made. Often during centre time, students construct their own surveys and go around asking their friends "which one do you like best?" Most of the time, it is with a partner, like these two:

This was interesting because we have not seen any surveys done horizontally across the page like that. It is often so rewarding to see where their inspiration takes them and what they come up with without having been told or showed how to.

 

Hope everyone had a restful weekend. See you tomorrow!! :)

There's snowplace like school!

 Finally some snow for us to play in!!

Last week, we looked at different types and styles of stained glass. We talked about where we would see this type of glass and pointed out what kinds of shapes we saw in some of the pictures we searched on Google Images. One of the students mentioned that they saw stained glass at Church. We wondered how stained glass was coloured, how it was made and what was involved in the process of making it, so we looked it up on YouTube  and watched a video. It seemed like a lot of work was involved! Because stained glass is made by adults, we made our own kid friendly version using a snowflake as a silhouette and tissue paper, which we glued onto the background. Some turned out more layered than others and had a different effect but they all resembled real snowflakes.. different and unique in their own way. We hung them up in our windows and they came out VERY colourful!!

 And this is what it looks like from the inside of our classroom!

Here are some structures built by one of our students during centre time:

 We have been continuing on our data management strand, using surveys, tally marks, and pictographs.

 

We have been practicing how to count tally marks, when they are in bunches of 5 (skip counting) and adding onto that number.

 

 Ironically, the day we did this survey on how many teeth have been lost, one of our students lost another tooth, totalling 3..so our graph results changed a bit.

This is one of our students who created his own survey and went around the classroom asking his friends which picture they like best.

 

Upcoming dates to remember:

 

Friday Jan 15th- P.A Day

 Every Monday- Library Day

Fri Jan 29th-Backwards Day & Good News Assembly

 

Enjoy the rest of your week!

 

 

 

A New year, a new day, a new possibility...

Welcome back! We hope you had an enjoyable winter break and are ready to begin a new year. I always say "don't look back, you're not going that way..." However, as an educator, I find myself constantly reflecting on my practice and trying to find ways to improve my program and support the students in our class.

I am going to back track a little bit back to the last week of December when we started a short, but sweet inquiry on hot chocolate. We explored our senses through discussing our curiosities and then talking about what we saw when we made it, what we smelled and what we tasted. Here are some pictures of some of the work and thoughts on our display board:

 Our hot chocolate simmering in the Crock Pot:

What better way to spend the last day of school then to be in our pajamas, having hot chocolate?!

We have some more fun surprises to share in the upcoming months and look forward to blogging about them!

 

Keep warm!! :)