Song of the Week: May 6

Scientists in the School: Marvellous Machines Workshop

Both the morning and afternoon classes had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a Scientist in the School workshop. A "scientist" and special guest came into our classroom and led a program with the children that focused on all of the marvellous or simple machines that help make our work easier.

These are the simple machines the scientist focused on with the children.

The children learned about the usefulness of inclined planes by racing objects down them as they were positioned at different angles.

The children learned about gears by creating bubbles using an egg beater. It was much easier than mixing with a spoon!

More gear exploration. When you move one gear, all of the gears move!

The scientist works with the children to help them understand the importance of axels and wheels.

If it has an edge, it's a wedge. The children explored wedges, such as nails, pizza cutters, zippers and shovels. 

At home: Simple machines are found everywhere! Work with your child to locate simple machines in your home and talk about why they make our lives easier.

Song of the Week: April 22

Our Trip to the Valley

Both the morning and afternoon classes had the exciting opportunity to visit our local valley alongside the Grade 3 and Grade 4 children. The older children acted as guides, as they regularly have their outdoor education classes down in the valley and know the area well.

The weather cooperated and the morning class had a wonderful time exploring the valley with the older children and on our own. The afternoon class was not as fortunate! Despite this, the children made the best of their situation and had a great time splashing around in the rain.

Walking along the ridgeway path. This offered an amazing view of the surrounding area,  highways and C.N. Tower.

Here, we are inside a tree-branch shelter built and cared for by the outdoor education classes.

Looking at the river below and a couple of swimming ducks. 

The morning class explore a hidden trail and found some workers removing logs from the river. 

Walking up the huge hill with the afternoon children.

The afternoon children on their way down the stone path to the shelter. 

The Green Grass Grows All Around

Here is a fun Youtube video of The Green Grass Grows All Around from Barney.

Song of the Week: April 8

The Death of an Ant: geometry for real life

While tidying up, the afternoon class accidentally squished an ant. The children were so upset by what had happened that they decided to create a funeral for the ant to let it know that they were sorry. It was decided that we would bury it outside and that we needed a stop sign so no one would step on it and a box to put it in. In creating these items, the children demonstrated their growing understandings of shapes and spatial sense. 

                                         the stop sign

"I was making an octagon with a ruler to make sure the sides were the same length." 

"We were making a stop sign. We were cutting the paper." 

"I was counting the vertices and then I was counting the sides to make sure it was an octagon." 

                                                                          the box

"I cutting a paper square. 6 squares because it's a cube."

"I making the box. A cube. Squares. I drawing the squares. A cube because it's squares." 

"I done my box. I put squares."

The children and I buried the ant using leaves from our classroom and put up the stop sign and a sign letting everyone know that we had buried our ant on this spot. 

Song of the Week: April 1

Our Flower Shop

Our ever-changing drama centre has been a home centre, doctor's office, the Valley and pizza shop. The children have now voted to turn it into a flower shop. Both the morning and afternoon classes have been working hard to brainstorm what they need in a flower shop and turn their vision into a reality. 

Some of the children decided to turn our tree into a flowering one and have been drawing, painting and collecting flowers to add to it. 

The afternoon children decided that we need to grow flowers in our shop and laid down large brown paper as soil. 

Onto this "soil," many of the children have been "growing" their own sculpted flowers using wire, beads and plasticine that have turned out beautifully. These flowers have taken a great deal of time, patience and fine motor capabilities to create. 

Our flower shop is still very much a work in progress at this point, but already many curriculum areas, such as measurement, counting, adding and subtracting, shapes, spatial sense, reading, writing, science and the visual arts are being explored when playing here.  For example, some children were making use of the index in a book to find wildflowers they wanted to draw. Others were connecting earlier learning when explaining that the flowers in our shop would need sunlight, air and water to grow. 

Our flower shop is a perfect addition to our classroom as a way of welcoming the sunny spring weather and I can't wait to see what other learning will emerge as it continues to grow.

Song of the Week: March 25

Amaryllis Revisions

The children and I have enjoyed watching our Amaryllis bulbs grow into beautiful flowers. 

In addition to taking photographs of the flowers, the children decided to draw them. Rather than simply creating a quick sketch, we focused on looking closely at the plant and representing them to the best of our abilities. This often meant that the children required multiple opportunities to draw the Amaryllis in order to produce a representation that was their best work. With each drawing, the children demonstrated an increasing ability to attend to details as they considered the shapes, width, lengths and positions of the parts of the Amaryllis. When they felt they had done their best work, they finalized their drawing using watercolour crayons. 

Here are some of the representations:

 

Song of the Week: March 18

Loose Parts & Found Objects: Sculptures

Earlier this year, we embarked on a journey with "beautiful stuff" in which we collected, sorted, classified and created self-portraits using treasures the children and I brought in from home. As an extension to this, the children used these loose parts and found materials to build their own sculptures.

After exploring the materials, some of the children knew exactly what they wanted to build. Others were asked questions, such as, "What does this remind you of? What can you imagine building with this?" to help get their imaginations going.

Most of the children began by first drawing a blueprint of their design. Then they got to work turning their two-dimensional sketch into a three-dimsensional structure. The final sculptures resulted after days or even weeks of hard work and dedication and were ones the children were extremely proud of.

Here are just some of the examples of what we created:

Many of you have been in to visit the display board outside our classroom that features stories and pictures about the sculpture process, as well as the children's writing about their work. Please continue to pop in and share this exciting learning experience with your child. 

At home: Continue the construction process at home using objects you have lying around (e.g. empty cereal boxes, tin cans, wooden spoons, pots, thread spools). Encourage your child to create a sketch of their design before or even after building and label or write about their work.  The objects do not need to be glued together and instead can be used repeatedly to construct new sculptures. This is a fun and engaging project your child can do with others while learning about topics, such as measurement, balance, stability, shapes and spatial sense.