Cones, cones, everywhere

With our senior kindergartens, we looked at the cones from various evergreen trees. We noticed that some cones had opened up with the warm weather, and others were still tightly bundled up.

Some were big, some were small.

Some pine cones were soft, some were hard. Some had been eaten by a little critter!

We are conducting an experiment to see what happens when we put pine cones that are open (they open to release seeds once the weather turns warm) into the freezer. We wonder if they’ll close up!

When looking at the maple tree, we could see the scar from where it had been tapped last maple season.

Piet Mondrian painting

This well known artist became famous for big blocks of colour outlined by black.

We decided to do our own rendition of a Mondrian painting. We started by using a piece of cardboard or a ruler dipped in black paint to create lines. We talked about horizontal and vertical lines.

After they were dry, we used pastels to colour the shapes.

We’ve now cut them in to the most spectacular Mondrian influences Easter egg shapes!

Maple syrup anyone?

We have changed our dramatic arts centre again, with spring upon us, we made it into a sugar shack or pancake house. (One of the girls exclaimed as she came in “Look, it’s Fulton’s!”). We began by graphing who had visited a sugar shack. We’ve been having so much fun playing here. After watching a video about how the native Canadians showed the early settlers how to make syrup, we have been drilling holes in our “trees”...

We have been tapping in the spiels...

Making pancakes...

We’ve made a menu...

A sign...

We even priced the bottles of syrup...

Please feel free to let us know if you have some expertise or materials you’d like to share!

Yaki Concert

We had a great time at our Yaki concert this morning. He had everyone moving and grooving. Be sure to ask your child about the ketchup song, dead mosquitoes (Despisito), and the wheels on the bus for starters. We had some songs involving audience participation!

Here are a few pictures of our fun.

Why do trees have bark?

With the senior kindergartens this week, we have done some investigations involving trees this week during our outdoor education time.

We started off by taking a look at the tree, specifically the bark. We talked about why the tree has bark, and what part of our body the bark is like. Trees have a system much like our veins that transport tree sap (like our blood). The bark is like our skin, or maybe even our jacket, it protects us. Like humans, bark can be very different tree to tree.

Focussing their observations. They noted different shapes, colours, different lines, texture, etc.

Next, we played a fun game...Find The Tree. Each student got a blindfold and another student led them to a tree where they were only to use their sense of touch to identify the tree. Their partner led them back to our gathering place, then they had to see if they could find their tree.

We then completed some bark rubbings with different trees noting the different bark.