Arrival of our caterpillars

Our butterfly larvae recently arrived in our classroom.

From the beginning their arrival has caused quite a stir.

At first we were curious about what was in the boxed marked: "Live Specimens".

We spent time listening to see if we could hear anything in the box before we opened it.

Students enjoyed sharing many different ideas about what was in the box!

 

We have been watching our caterpillars closely over the last few weeks to see how quickly they are growing and changing.

 

We are closely watching the caterpillars crawling in our butterfly house.

We have spent time trying to count all the caterpillars we see.

We have been reading many stories about caterpillars and butterflies and have been learning a lot about how they grow and change.

As our caterpillars have been growing we have been taking time to try and sketch/draw what we are observing.

Students are being encouraged to both add details of what they see and to explain their drawings.

A highlight recently was letting the caterpillars crawl on us before we put them back into their houses.

At first we weren't sure how the caterpillars would feel but we soon discovered they were tickly when they crawled.

Caterpillar Excitement

Our butterfly larvae recently arrived in our classroom.

From the beginning their arrival has caused quite a stir.

At first we were curious about what was in the boxed marked: "Live Specimens"

We watched closely to see what was inside.

 We were excited to discovered a container of caterpillars.

We examined the container closely and soon noticed how small the caterpillars were.

 

After observing the caterpillars for a few days we helped mix more food and move the caterpillars into their own houses so they would have more room to grow.

We have been watching our caterpillars closely over the last few weeks to see how quickly they are growing and changing.

We have been reading many stories about caterpillars and butterflies and have been learning a lot about how they grow and change.

As our caterpillars have been growing we have been taking time to try and sketch/draw what we are observing.

Students are being encouraged to both add details of what they see and to explain their drawings.

Our highlight this week was having the caterpillars crawl on us before returning them to their little houses.

We are watching closely to see when they will start to form their chrysalis and when they will change into butterflies.

Representing Spring

Students have continued to show a lot of interest in the Spring changes they are observing outside.

To capture this interest in the classroom we continued our classroom web about Spring.

As we read different Spring stories we added ideas to our idea web.

After adding many ideas to our web we decided to provide students with plasticine to represent their ideas of Spring.

Students quickly expressed an interest in the different ways they could manipulate the plasticine to represent Spring. 

Once their Spring representation was completed we recorded students’ description of their representations.

Through these representations students practiced many different skills, including;

Learning Links:

Social/Emotional: Persistence, Sharing materials with others

Physical: Fine motor skills-pinching, rolling, squeezing plasticine

Intellectual: Representing an idea using a variety of materials, Communicating ideas to others

Spiritual: Connecting to nature, Creativity

Here's a short video highlighting students' creations and their explanations:

Create your own free photo slideshow

A Shopping We Will Go Project

Students were recently engaged in a variety of grocery store and food based activities, including:

• playing in our classroom grocery store
• bringing empty food boxes to school to add to our store
• experimenting with paint to create different colored food
• making and eating fruit and vegetable rainbows
• creating shopping lists
• visiting a realy grocery store
• deciding to recycle our food boxes when our project was done
• walking to the recycling bins

Through all of these activites students were actively involved and excited about what we were doing at school.

Here is a short presentation of the different activities students were involved in over the course of this project and some of the learning that took place:

A Shopping We Will Go Project

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Happy Mother's Day

We hope you all had a fantastic Mother's Day.

We had a lot of fun creating many special projects for our moms.

While working on all of our Mother's Day projects we were learning and working on:

Social/Emotional: Sharing materials with others, working collaboratively
Physical: Fine motor skills-pencil grip while writing and colouring, scissor skills
Intellectual: Sharing ideas with others, Vocabulary-names of different seeds
Spiritual: Celebrating a special occasion, Connecting to nature-taking care of our herb gardens and watching them grow

Here's a short video of some of our hard work:

http://smilebox.com/playBlog/4d7a45314d7a51344d54453d0d0a&blogview=true

Happy Mother's Day

We hope you all had a fantastic Mother's Day!

We've spent time the last couple of weeks getting ready for Mother's Day.

Here's a short video of us describing some of our work:

Create your own slideshow design

We had a lot of fun creating many special projects for our moms.

While working on all of our Mother's Day projects we were learning and working on:

Social/Emotional: Sharing materials with others, working collaboratively
Physical: Fine motor skills-holding and controlling a paintbrush, pencil grip while writing and colouring, scissor skills
Intellectual: Sharing ideas with others, Vocabulary-colors and shapes
Spiritual: Celebrating a special occasion

Here's a brief look at some of our hard work:

Another free scrapbook by Smilebox

Planting fun

We are continuing to discuss different Spring things at school and have started an idea web about Spring.

Several students have brought in bird nests for us to examine.

As we continue to explore Spring things students are beginning to show an interest in things that are growing.

We have provided students with a variety of seeds to explore and have been planting and taking care of different plants at school.

Through all of our seed and plant activities students are working on many different skills:

Social/Emotional:  Cooperating and sharing with friends when we play in the dirt at the sensory table

Physical: Fine motor skills- manipulating small materials, Holding and controlling a pencil when drawing seeds, Practicing cutting skills when creating our own seed package

Intellectual:  Developing our language skills when we compare and describe different seeds, Learning about plants and how to take care of them

Spiritual:  Appreciating nature as we explore seeds and watch our plants grow

We provided students with a variety of seed packages and allowed them to explore and compare the different seeds.

 

We encouraged students to sort the different seeds both in small groups and in the sensory table.

We have also provided students with dirt and a variety of planting tools in the sensory table to explore.

Family Day Fun!

Family Friday at the greenhouse was a lot of fun.

We enjoyed looking at many different plants and learning all about how different flowers and plants grow.

All About Birds

 Students have continued to show interest in the different Spring things they are seeing outside.  

They were really excited to find a real bird nest in one of our courtyard trees.

Through all of our bird and nests activities we are working on:

Social/Emotional: Sharing and cooperating with our friends, Interacting with our friends making nests at the sensory table

Physical: Fine motor skills- manipulating small materials, holding and controlling a pencil when drawing

Intellectual: Learning facts about birds, Recalling information about birds

Spiritual:  Appreciating nature while exploring bird materials, Demonstrating creativity and curiosity when creating our own nests

A picture of the nest we found in our courtyard.

Finding our very own nest and exploring different nests that have been brought to school as created an interest in birds and their nests.

To integrate this interest into the classroom we took advantage of a sunny day and went on a walk to find different materials to build a nest.

We paired the children up, gave them a plastic bottle and went hunting for materials birds would use to build a nest:

We found a lot of different materials and enjoyed the sunny day of our walk.

Here's a look at the bird nest bottles we collected and some of the nests we have been exploring.

After bringing our nest bottles back to school was spent time examining what we had found and trying to draw some of the things in our bottles.

We have also put a variety of materials in our sensory table (e.g. feathers, sticks, brown play dough, etc.) and some birds to encourage students to try and build their own birds nests.

We used the playdough to make worms for our birds.

We have also been working hard building and painting bird feeders to put in our courtyard for our birds.

Working hard to sand wood for our bird feeder.