Valentine's Fun, Shapes, More Lego and Super Science Discoveries

Valentine's Writing Center

This week our writing center became a very popular place!  We even had to add another table to make room for all the friends that wanted to work here!  We turned our writing center into a Valentine's Writing center by adding stickers, heart shaped paper and Valentine words.  Mrs. Allan worked with some friends to create a special mailbox and our little writers are busy filling the box with letter for their classmates!

Exploring 2-D Shapes
We have been exploring circles, squares, triangles and rectangles.  The children have been learning to identify the characteristics of of these shapes, such as the number of sides and points.  We have read many stories about shapes and have used shapes to create artwork.  We are now ready to begin exploring 3-D shapes!

More Fun with Lego
As mentioned in a previous blog entry, building with Lego is a favourite activity in our classroom.  We are always looking for new ways to use the Lego to encourage further learning and discovery in our class.  We filled our sensory table with snow and let the children build in the snow with the Lego pieces.  What an interesting event this was and of course this lead into a discussion about melting!

Super Science Wednesday
If you walked by our classroom on Wednesday, you would have heard lots of excitement coming from our kindergarten room. We began our Super Science Wednesday by talking about how things change when they are mixed together.  The children looked at a container of cornstarch and then looked at shaving cream.  We used a variety of describing words as we looked at these materials.  

Well, you can imagine what happened next....that's right, we mixed the cornstarch with the shaving cream.  The children all had an opportunity to experiment with this mixture and discovered that it it could be molded into different shapes!  We made a list of new words to describe this mixture.  You may wish to try this activity at home...all you need is a box of cornstarch and a can of shaving cream.  (As you may have seen in the pictures....this is a little messy!)

 A Great Time for Learning!

It is hard to believe another month of school is over!  Where does the time go?  Well, we know that our time at school is very busy and full of great learning opportunities.  Take a look at the photos below to see just a peek of some of the  activities our students are engaged in.

Many of our student enjoy building with Lego and by putting the Lego into one of our sensory bins, the activity changed!  Before you know it, the children cooperated together to build "LEGO LAND".  We made roads, and signs and buildings.  We added words and letters to our play

Over the past 2 weeks, we have been enjoying stories by author Jan Brett.  This week we read the story, "The Three Bears".  After reading the story, some of the children noticed that this story is very similar to the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".  We call this a "TEXT TO TEXT CONNECTION" when we compare different stories.  In Jan Brett's "The Three Bears", the story takes place in a cold, snowy place where a polar bear family lives in an igoo.  The children really enjoyed this story and shortly after hearing it, a small group of students became involved in making their very own "igloos" using cubes and bear manipulatives.  Great retelling! 

During playtime, we put out sugar cubes and marshmallows and the children got to work at building their own igloos, once again adding the little bears to retell the story.  We saw some very creative building at this center!

Our Super Science Wednesday activity continued with our "melting and freezing inquiry".  Over the past few weeks we have been talking about melting and freezing.  The weather has certainly provided a great opportunity for this exploration.  Today, we focused on melting, using a griddle, aluminum muffin tray and a variety of materials (e.g., candle, crayon, freeze, butter, hershey kiss, cheese, sugar cube, cupcake sprinkles and a marshmallow).  We made predictions about which item would melt the fastest.  We observed the butter melted very very quickly.  We were surprised that the marshmallow and the sprinkles didn't really change at all.  We were sure to explain to the children how important it is to be safe around heat sources (e.g., griddle, candles, fireplace, campfire).  As usual, we were impressed with the wonderful job the children did at following directions during this activity.  A small group of friends were so excited about this activity that they wanted to write about our predictions, observations and findings.  We have started a new bulletin board in our classroom that display all of our "Super Science" discoveries!

The Beauty Shop is Open!

We asked the children to brainstorm ideas of what we could make our dramatic play area become.  The idea of a beauty shop was suggested and immediately we got to work at making this a new imaginative play center in our classroom.  We talked about rules for this center, so don't worry, your child will not be coming home with a new haircut or his/her fingernails painted.

Check out some of our pictures of the fun the children had in making and playing at this new center.  We were especially excited to see literacy at work, as the children made signs and were even writing names in the appointment book!  The language the children is using is also very interesting to hear.  We are often hearing "Hi, do you have an appointment today?", "You can come in and someone will be with you in a moment" and lots of other great phrases!  There have also been lots of great opportunities for cooperative play as the children wait for turns and help each other out as they have fun together.  

Look what is melting in kindergarten?

During our first week back to school, our kindergarten students were very interested in exploring the snow.  We began the week by bringing lots of BIG snowballs into our classroom, so that we could observe the melting process.  We added some paint to the "snow table" and look what happened.  We made the snow into "Rainbow Snow".

Remember our beautiful "Rainbow Snow"?  We made some predictions about how long it would take for all of the snow to melt.  Well, after leaving it in our water table for 3 days, we ended up with a very different final product.  Our beautiful snow melted and the colours all mixed together to create....a mess!  But, as we all know, learning can be messy.  We worked together to clean it up and it turned out to be a great learning process for us all!

On Super Science Wednesday, we played "The Melting Game".  We used the following different methods to help speed up the melting of an ice cube:
1.  Blow dryer
2.  Blow on the ice cube
3.  Drop the ice cube
4.  Hold the ice cube in your hand
5.  Put sprinkles of salt on the ice cube
6.  Float the ice cube in water