Winter outdoor fun

Recent weather has given us the opportunity to explore outside. We’ve been doing some birdwatching from both indoors and outdoors. While outside, we took a clip art and tried to keep track of the comings and goings of the chickadees by marking a tally as we counted them come in.

We’ve even had the opportunity to feed the birds from our head!

With the gently falling snow, we also took out our magnifying glasses and saw the crystals up close.

The candy store

With the beginning of December we dismantled our McDonalds drive through at our dramatic arts centre. Listening to the students, we made it into a candy store, with a festive flair! 

We got them to design and cut out a sign.

They’ve also been busy building patterned candy canes with beads.(and pricing them!)

We’ve been designing lollipops!

Pricing everything is so hard!

We’ve introduced some measurement by asking them to package their candies and then weigh them.

An elf has come to visit!

I understand that once December hits, some elves make their way here from the North Pole. They made their way into our classrooms. Bob visits the red class each day while Edward visits the blue class. The kids were super excited to find their new elfish friends!

Day one he even brought us a treat from the North Pole...a candy cane!

Holiday writing

In an attempt to entice our students to write, we have offered them a special “holiday reading pointer”. ( we did a similar thing at Halloween). Students are asked to write the phrase: I see.... and then complete it with a selection of Christmas words. They must have writing on all 5 pages, as well as some illustrations. They have loved the opportunity to get a reading pointer and have eagerly completed these little booklets!

Hopefully they’ll be excited to read to you their little masterpieces, some students worked really hard!

Festive activities

Here’s some photos depicting some of our festive activities this week.

Paper plate Christmas trees.

Our “ rooftop drop “ game has been a big hit, and it is great for math, not only are they counting the number of times their “present” makes it in, but they are recording it using tallies!

Hot cup of cocoa

We have a game set up where the students must roll a die and then add that many pretend marshmallows to their pretend hot up of cocoa. It is a great activity for students to count and solidify their understanding of number value, but also it helps the development of fine motor skills as they must use tweezers to pick up the “marshmallows “!

Colour Zoo

We have been talking a lot about shapes. We read the simplistic book called Colour Zoo.

The students are encouraged to use the coloured transparent shapes on the light table to recreate some of the illustrations from the book.