Student Teachers!

You may hear your child speaking about new teachers in the classroom.  We would like to welcome Mrs. Speed and Mrs. Negin from The Faculty of Education.  They are here until March 2. 
We are also welcoming Mr. Gavin from General Amherst High School.  He is doing a co-op placement until the end of the year. 

Colour Mixing!!

We read the story, Little Blue and Little Yellow written by Leo Lionni and the children have been busy mixing colours to make new colours.  We discussed the 3 primary colours and the children were off to explore how they can make new colours.

They mixed colours at the painting centre!!

They use eye droppers and cups to mix coloured water together!!!

Parent Tips to Improve Language and Literacy

Stimulate children to think and talk about things beyond what’s happening in the here-and-now. Make comments and ask questions that encourage them to imagine and pretend, to think about the past and the future, about why things happen and how to solve problems, as well as to consider other people’s opinions, emotions and perspectives. The ability to use this kind of abstract language provides a critically important foundation for learning to read.

Tips

Daily Activities:

When you change a routine, do something unusual or when things don’t go as planned, explain why this has happened. For example, “We can’t have cereal for breakfast because I forgot to buy milk”.

Pretend Play:

Introduce a problem for your child to solve when pretending together. For example, “There’s no milk for the baby and the stores are closed! What can we do?”

Reading Books:

Ask your child questions that encourage him/her to predict what will happen in a story. For example, “What do you think will happen when the boy opens the door?” Give him/her time to answer.

On the Go…:

Ask your child to think about other people’s feelings in various situations. For example, “How do you think that boy felt when he went to a new school?”

The Greater Essex County District School Board

Speech and Language Services

Source: The Hanen Center; 2008 Preschool Language and Literacy Calendar

Sparkles!!

On Friday, some of the children were noticing the sparkles on their clothing so I decided to start the day off today with a survey.  When the children arrived this morning, they had to sign their name on to the graph.  The question was: Are you wearing sparkles today?  After the graph was completed, we discovered 8 people were wearing sparkles and 11 were not.  (We had 6 people away this morning)
After looking at all of the sparkles on the childrens' clothing, we wrote words that describe the sparkles.  The children wrote their own words.  They came up with, light-up, glow, sparkly, glitter and shine.  At the art centres their was lots of sparkle material to add to their creations!!!!

We then read the story, The Rainbow Fish written by Marcus Pfister and below some of the children were re-telling the story at the puppet centre. 

What we did at school today???

We painted with marbles and containers!!

We played with animals that live in cold temperatures at the water table.  The penguins are on a glacier here!!

We made puppets and put on a puppet show!

We played games on the smartboard!!

We made a road and talked about different kinds of transportation!

One student put out fires.  We had a fire station at the drama centre!!

We made ramps!!

We made crafts.  These 2 students made a helicopter and an airplane!

We discovered how dirty the snow is when it melts!!

We painted with our hands and made hand-print paintings!!

We played with dinosaurs at the sand table!!

We cleaned up!!!



Melting Continued Today!!!

The eraser did not melt in the hot water...........The pencil, pencil crayon and crayon did not melt when placed in front of the heater........so..........we came up with another idea.  Let's see what would happen if we put it somewhere else even hotter.  The idea of the oven popped up.  We put all of these items in the oven and discovered that the only thing that did melt was the crayon.  We then made our own crayons using muffin tins.  The pencil became very soft and changed shape but nothing happend to the eraser or the pencil crayon.  What a discovery!!!!   We know that not everything will melt!!

We put out new crayons out at the writing centre.  They really work!!!!!!