Earth Day

Today for Earth Day we talked a lot about pollution and ways that we can help take care of the Earth. We discussed reusing, recycling, and making sure not to litter. We headed out to the school yard with trash bags and gloves to do our part to clean up litter.

Sorry, I didn't take many pictures but I just have to share this photo of a recycling centre built by these three little ones:

"The green box is for cardboard recycling, the red box is for paper, and the blue one is for old clothes."

A powerful example of how children consolidate their learning through their play!

We also learned this classic Raffi song, "Evergreen, Everblue." Encourage your child to sing it with you at home!

KD Builds

We are a class of builders this year. Every child loves to build in our class, girls and boys alike. While it might look like they are just playing, they are actually learning a ton about 2D and 3D shapes, balance, symmetry, storytelling, and communicating with others etc..

Oh, and following the rules. Here are the building centre rules the students came up with (read by FM):

We are lucky to have our school district's lending library send us new building materials every month. Here's some things we've built over the past few months:

Magnetos (a magnetic building toy)

Working Together

NH and RL found the magnetic blocks would stick to the radiator. They made a shelf for the balls.

Lincoln Logs

DD made the letter B

KD's airport with airplanes

Megablocks

KL and LP's castle

RM and KD made an elaborate castle with a village inside

The dice are the people

Other materials

NH exploring the cube shape

KL and LP make structures out of wooden sticks and modeling clay

"I made a blue, blue house. Then I had a car in there and a suitcase and two chargers and two Ipads," F.M.

KL and LP used pattern blocks to make furniture for the stuffed rabbit. A bed, toilet, and dresser.

Even numbers can be used to build!

KD made homes for animals using wooden blocks, cotton balls, and rocks.

NH's tower of wooden blocks

For the month of March, I challenged everyone to not only build structures, but to draw and write about them as well. After a while, we had enough drawings to create a class book.

The Castle "Hanging on the Castle is a bird house. At the top is stop" by LP

by AV

by RM

by KB

TY and SA decided to make the longest line of blocks they could. It was a challenge to draw!

Here's the finished product:

"Tower World"

What will we build next?

Hoildays Galore!

St. Patrick's day fell on a school day this year. The children were amazed and excited to see that a leprechaun had visited our classroom just before they arrived. 

He had left a big mess!

There were footprints everywhere,

even across the morning message!

He'd turned a lot of things in our classroom upside down: the alphabet, the weather chart, the daily schedule, even some of the teacher's writing!

He seemed to have been trying to collect and steal all the green things in our room.

But something seems to have made him drop the loot and scamper out the window suddenly.

Kids stare in amazement at the leprechaun mess. He even tipped their baskets over and left footprints on the bottom!

Everyone helped to put the classroom back together. Then we found that the leprechaun had left us a scavenger hunt with some treats at the end for our trouble. The children were disappointed it wasn't gold, but they enjoyed the candy anyways. 

The following week, as the Easter holidays approached, we had a few classroom activities to celebrate the season:

Decorating bunnies and eggs and making Easter cards.

RQ made a playdough bunny

The finished product

DD tries a fine motor activity: using a clothespin to put pom-poms into the matching colour of Easter egg.

RL made the pom-pom/egg activity into a dice game. Here he keeps track of scores.

It was green team vs. yellow team.

Explaining the game.

I hope everyone had a great holiday!