Earth Day Every Day!

This week at school, many of our activities focused on the concept of taking care of our environment.  It was another busy week with lots of hands on learning opportunities.

Here we are outside on Earth Day with Mr. Arundine.  Mr. Arundine took us on a tour of the pond area located on our school grounds.  The entire school community worked together on  Monday to clean-up the pond area so that we can use this as a learning space.  Our kindergarten friends helped by continuing to work on our "kindergarden" by adding more mulch. 

Inside our classroom we sorted items into the red and blue bins.  Mrs. Ducharme even went through the garbage can on Friday to see how we are doing at putting things in the correct place.  We are doing pretty well at remembering what items go in the recycle boxes and which items go in the garbage.  Your child might be reminding you of proper recycling at home...(just a warning!!)

Thanks to everyone who brought in a piece of material for our classroom quilt.  It was a great activity enjoyed by many of our students!  The children were really excited to see how something new could be made out of something old!  Thanks to Mrs. Allan for bringing in her sewing machine and taking the time to work on this project with our friends.  

We ended our week by making birdfeeders using birdseed, bagels and lard.  We went out to the pond area in a small group to hang the birdfeeders on trees.  We plan to check back next week to see if the birdfeeders look any different.  

Rose City Gymnastics Trip

Today our JK/SK students went on a field trip to Rose City Gymnastics.  It was a great outing and we heard lots of the children comment on how much fun they had.  The children had lots of opportunity to roll, run, jump, stretch and exercise their large muscles!  Take a look at our friends in motion.  I apologize if some of the photos aren't so clear....the children were constantly in motion.  We are sure that all of our students will sleep extra well tonight!

Welcome To Our New Friends in Kindergarten!

Super Science Wednesday was extra exciting today as our kindergarten friends welcomed some new friends into our classroom...caterpillars!  Yes, the caterpillars have arrived and we are all eager to watch as they make their change into butterflies.  This is a great learning opportunity for our students to learn about life cycles.  

Today, we talked about "What We Know About Caterpillars and Butterflies".  Next we will be thinking about "What We Wonder About Caterpillars and Butterflies".  Here are some photos of our friends investigating the caterpillars today.  

Here we are recording our observations of how the caterpillars looked today.

Getting a closer look at our caterpillar friends!

Super Science Wednesday....Ready for Take-off!

If you walked by our classroom this afternoon, you would have heard lots of sounds of excitement as the children created their very own paper planes for Super Science Wednesday.  We have been noticing that making planes is an interest of many of our students and we wanted to encourage this interest to lead into investigation and learning.

Each student got to select their own paper to create an airplane.  Some airplanes were made out of construction paper, bristol board, newspaper and even paper towels.  Of course, we had to decorate the airplanes a little with stickers and markers!

Here we are showing off our airplanes!
Can you tell we are excited?

 Then it was time for take-off!  Each student had a turn to make his/her airplane fly!  The students helped come up with the idea to mark where each airplane landed with tape so we could MEASURE to see which airplanes went the shortest and longest distances!  We love when we can use our math skills during out science activities!

Mrs. Allan got into the fun and created the BIGGEST airplane using bristol board.  Guess what we discovered?  Mrs. Allan's airplane flew the farthest distance!  We also concluded that since Mrs. Allan and some other friends folded their airplanes differently that affected how far the airplanes flew.

During big playtime following Super Science, the interest in airplanes continued for many of the students, so we continued flying our airplanes and comparing distances in the cubby room.  Here are two friends that decided on their own to grab a clipboard and record their findings.

The airplanes were all shapes and sizes, from very small to big!

 What are we up to in JK/SK this week?

There are so many great things happening in our Early Years classroom.  Take a look at "just another day in Mrs. Ducharme and Mrs. Allan's class"!

Spring has sprung in our class and that means it is planting time.  We planted some flowers today and radishes.  We have also been busy checking on the "kindergarden" over the last few days.  Exciting news...our tulips are starting to come up.  We will be measuring the growth of the tulips regularly.  We also are making predictions about what color the tulips will be!  Today we learned that some things are planted from a bulb (like our tulips) and some things can be planted from a seed.

We are using the Smartboard to reinforce the concepts of letters and sounds.  One of our favourite games continues to be the "monkey match"!

We love puzzles!  Take a look at our friends working so hard to
match upper and lowercase letters!

We are currently working on a class book called "Our Favourite Weather".  The children are copying print from our weather word list, as well as using their "best guess spelling" and the word wall to help in their writing.  

We are learning that there are so many different measuring tools!  Today we explored the use of thermometers to measure warm and cold water.  It was "wet fun", but the children were excited to observe the thermometer change.