Wondering About Worms

 After our Backyard Bugs workshop, the children have been interested in finding out more about the creepy crawlies around them. Digging for worms in our own backyard has become an activity the children look forward to. 

        

 After gathering the worms, we brought them into the classroom for a closer look.






Examining worms helps us think about questions we want to research. 

Board Games

The children have been enjoying developing their number sense by playing Snakes and Ladders.


At Home: Board games involving rolling a die and moving from one end of the board to another is a fun and easy way to engage your child while furthering their understanding of number. Skills that are being honed include: number recognition, recognizing quantities without counting, principles of counting, understanding of quantity (numbers get bigger as you move forward and decrease as you move back). 

Grocery Store Dramatic Play

 We decided to turn the drama centre into a grocery store. We discussed the roles of the grocer and cashier.

Using a cash register filled with play money helps us extend and create a context for our investigation of Canadian coins.  
















We created signs to label our healthy grocery store food. 




Of course, no grocery store is complete without a shopping cart!

At home: Invite your child to help create a grocery list with you. On a trip to the grocery store, you and your child can search for the items. Encourage your child to identify familiar signs for products and their costs and think about how the food has been sorted in the store.

Canada in my Pocket: A song about Canadian coins

This week, we talked about Canadian coins. The children enjoyed listening to this song as a way of further exploring Canadian symbols.

Song of the Week: Jenny Jenkins

Backyard Bugs

 Our Backyard Bugs workshop presented by the Scientists in the School program was a huge success! The children had a blast being entomologists. 


Thank you to all of our parent volunteers for making this fabulous learning opportunity possible!


The children were able to meet the insect family and discover their unique anatomy while developing a new appreciation of bugs by investigating how bugs behave, eat, see and hear. 

We learned that insects have three body parts (a head, thorax and abdomen) and six legs.

We created insects of our very own!

We helped butterflies play hide and seek using camouflage and learned what it means to be symmetrical. 


These are just a few of the activities presented to us by our scientist. The children and I have been inspired to look at bugs in a different light and will continue to explore the wonderful world of insects for the remainder of the school year.


At home: Search for insects around your home and neighbourhood and bring them to school as a specimen study.

Ten Frames

 The children pretended they were math detectives and used ten frames showing numbers from 1 to 10 as their clues. Their task was to figure out the fastest way to move from one number to the next. They were given a number card and asked to show this number on their blank ten frame. 

Then, they were given a different number card and asked to show this new number on their ten frame. The key was not to completely clear their frame, but to add dots (to move from 6 to 10, for example,) or subtract dots (to move from 8 to 3, for example). 




At home: Create your own ten frame by dividing a piece of paper into ten boxes. You can use circles cut out of construction paper as your counters, or any set of ten objects (e.g. beads, beans, cotton balls)