Measuring our Planting a Promise Garden

Spring has sprung at our end of the country and believe it or not our flowers are
                                     starting to come up.

When we came back to school, from Christmas break, I noticed our Planting a Promise garden had tiny green shoots.  Our daffodils are sprouting.  Time to begin
                                          measuring.
                         
   I packed our nature bags with clipboard, a post it note, pencil and a ruler.
         
                 This is our second week measuring the plants.
   Each family tried to find the same plant that they measured last week.
    
Once they found it we were ready to mark it with a name stick so
                each week we’ll know which plants to measure.
               
Working with rulers is new for our children and one lesson we learned was to
          turn the ruler so the low numbers 1,2,3… started at the ground.
     
After they counted how tall the sprout was they then recorded it on their
                                               post-it note.

                       Printing the number and drawing a picture. 
         
  This is our chart where we have been and will continue to record our findings.
                       
Each week we’ll check the growth and predict what number our plant will
                                   be at before we measure.
              
                  In one week the plants grew one centimeter.

Play Trays From Last Week

Feed the Penguin game.  Roll the die, match the colour to a fish and feed the
    penguin.  It’s made from a coffee creamer container covered with felt.

       Once the penguin is full unscrew the lid and empty him.


                       What floats? What sinks?
      
Experimenting with the different materials provided then sorting
                  by what they do in the water.

  
Patterning cards from Scholastic using penguins, snowflakes, mittens and sleds.

    
I found these small pool balls at a thrift store.  They are numbered 1 – 10
                 which works great for placing on our 10 golf tees.

Being Penguins

      
I like costumes and I have quite a few miscellaneous pieces at home.  They
come in handy for many opportunities.  Like this week when we are talking
about penguins. 
       
I brought in my tuxedo tails for the children to try on to ‘be penguins’.  They
loved it.  The sleeves were so long that when they flapped their arms it looked
like wings.
                       
                   Of course I had to give it a try.

Grumble, Rumble, Gurgle, Roar

I found a story on line about a little penguin that hears a strange noise and realizes it’s his tummy rumbling.  So he sets off to find something to eat.  I like the story because of the stomach growl sounds that are repeated throughout the story and that it helps children learn about what penguins eat.
              
         You can listen to Whoopi Goldberg narrate the story on nickjr. 

                      I decided to make it into an oral story with props.

I’m a Papa Penguin

We’ve continued with our Penguin Shuffle adding a few more moves of what penguins do, like; swim and slide.  We showed our big buddies how to do the shuffle too.
    

This week we pretended to be Papa penguins and take care of an egg.

    Each child got a plastic egg to place on the top of their feet. 
      
Then we did a little shuffle.  It’s hard work to hold the egg in place.

              
Then last night, I couldn’t believe what I found while on Pinterest, a Papa Penguin poem.  You can find the poem at Little Book Lane website.  The tune is to “I’m a Little Teapot”. 
            
           Today we taught it to our big buddies.

Sorry the sound isn’t the best.

We’re Building an Igloo

Have you seen blogs that show how to build an igloo using milk jugs?  Here is one from Little Giraffes Teaching Ideas that I thought would be manageable.  It only needs about 130 jugs.  I'm sure we could collect that many.
                       
So during December I started asking friends, teachers and families from
                     StrongStart to begin to save jugs.
                  
     Last week the jugs started to be delivered and we started building.
  We placed yarn on the floor to help make the round shape, it turned out more
                                           like a horseshoe.

   
We had to wait a couple of days before we had enough to add another row.  But in the meantime the children found other ways to enjoy the igloo.  The jugs work well as drums.
  
And trying to take them apart was a popular activity, as well as playing with the
                                               loose jugs.


Just gluing the jugs together wasn’t strong enough so I started wrapping each row with packing tape.   As the walls got higher the children explored the inside and continued playing with the loose jugs.


Four rows high and we’re ready to start the beginning of the roof.  I attached a board across the opening so the row will be a complete circle.  Lots of jugs arrived today and these boys are placing them around to see if there is enough for the whole row.
 
       Or maybe they were just emptying the box so they could play with it.

  

This is how it looked at the end of the day.  

About 60 more jugs should be enough.  

Stay tune.