Gym Play

We are fortunate to have the gym for a half hour every day.

We always start by having a good run

then we gather in a circle to sing Ring Around the Rosie.

Then we bring out equipment.

I enjoy watching the children and families use the equipment in very fun ways.

 Build it up and knock it down is a classic but here I liked how they stacked them on top of each other so it was a double knock down.

 A slide is very popular even when you don't have a traditional one.

 Mini pylons to be stacked and unstacked.

 Making music with what is at hand.

Establishing the rules of the play.

Core work?

Crowns for Us and Them

These are our newest toys.

I made little wooden kings and queens and princes and princesses.

 I just learned how to 'wet' felt and made these little pouches to colour match and tuck them into bed.

They were great to go in our wooden block castle.

The children made their own crowns at the art table.

 Cutting on the line, zig zag.

Or right across the paper if that works well.

 Or into tiny little pieces = great practice.

 Jewels were added, by size and shape

and patterns.

Castles

We have been exploring castles for the last few weeks.
Remember we are building a gingerbread castle with our big buddies?
Today we started to put it together.

The towers are together but we need to give them a bit of time to become firm and not fall apart.  We'll continue on Friday.
In our class room we made a much bigger castle, one that we can play in.

A parent brought in 2 very large boxes and we built the castle around our climber/slide.
We spent a day painting the castle well it took us all morning.

As our queen was going down the slide she announced that we needed a throne.

 

We didn't have a throne handy but we did have a free table and chairs.

Added a royal blue tablecloth and a couple of silver goblets and jewels.

As the days passed we added wall paper (to cover up the print on the boxes).

Some drapery for a whimsical feel and picture frames on the walls.

What is a castle without a magic mirror?

A dragon visited but that is for another day.

Skeletons - Dinosaurs and Ours

This morning was about bones.

Not real bones though.

We had pasta bones to build dinosaurs at the art table.

There were paper bones to build a 'people' skeleton.

And there were bones buried that we had to dig.

When we walked to the forest we saw a large snowball and thought maybe a dinosaur was frozen in it.

Next we spotted a hole in the tree with ice in it.

Maybe dino bones were in there.

But no we didn't find any.

We noticed our big buddies were over by the sand pit.

They called us over and we started to dig there.

It didn't take long before someone unearthed a bone.

We used brushes to carefully move the dirt off.

And it was finally pulled free.

Look at the impression that was left in the sand.

It would have been cool to have used plaster of paris to make our own bone.

Maybe next time.

We went back to digging and it took us quite awhile to find them all.

We had to bring in the big shovel to speed things along.

After laying the bones out, we tried to figure out 

what kind of dinosaur it might be.

In the end we decided to call it "Headlessasaurus"

While the little buddies were digging our big buddies became interested in this little one crawling on the grass.  They were curious about what he was eating and how he moved about.

A spontaneous "Roots of Empathy" lesson.

National Child Day

November 20th is National Child Day and this year's theme is:
The right to the Enjoyment of the Highest Attainable Health

To celebrate this day our local Early Childhood Educators hold a 'guest reader' at each of their centres.
Fifteen centres are taking part this year and the ECE organization sponsors it purchasing a book for each centre.  This year's book is Llama Llama Home with Mama by Anna Dewdney.

Our guest, RCMP Officer Godard visited on Friday.
The children and families enjoyed listening to the story.