A week full of fun and learning

We know we said we would update the blog bi-weekly BUT we felt like this week was so great that we just needed to share! So let us begin...

First of all of our new friends LOVE learning! Not only that but many of them enjoy creating new things from found items and we have encouraged the exploration of math and literacy through nature. At the start of the week we decided to begin creating our alphabet wall. We provided the students with various items and we began exploring new letters. Some chose their letter and others asked what letter they could do. The results were incredible. We realize some of you have not accessed our Twitter account yet (link went home in Mr. Zippy) so we are attaching more photos.

The making of our alphabet inspired students to want to explore letters more and we read the story Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. After reading the book students later played a letter recognition game based on the story. Others were later inspired to create letters from found materials in the classroom and a few really wanted to practice writing some letters.

We went on a walk to collect natural materials...this time around we focused on different size sticks.  Our walk was VERY interesting as students were pointing out colours and noticed that some trees and branches also look like letters and various shapes.  The next day we read a book "Short, Tall, Big, or Small?" and we discussed the differences these descriptive words demonstrate.  We than played a game together on the carpet with our sticks (WOW we made a mess!! BUT IT WAS GREAT!).  The game was to sort the sticks into categories that were mentioned in our story. 

The next day our students went outside and we gathered around all the sticks.  Since they were demonstrating an interest in shapes and letters we decided to challenge them and see if we could make various shapes and letters with our sticks.  We quickly learned that making shapes like squares, rectangles, and triangles was easy to do with the sticks but a circle was really hard! We came inside and learned that this is because the first three shapes mentioned have points and straight sides whereas a circle is one continuous curved line. We asked the class "What materials could we use later next week to make circles?" They gave us many great ideas all which you will see on the next blog.

Some boys and girls were drawn to the beads and the challenge was to try to create a pattern.  This was simply to see what student's already knew about patterns. One student created a three colour repeating pattern to create a beautiful necklace.  We will continue to learn more about patterns in the next few weeks using all kinds of fun materials. During the week other students also used materials to learn more about shapes, big/small shapes to fill in larger shapes, and to create patterns with shapes.

We have been learning about the word September, some of the days of the week, and slowly integrating more number knowledge into our days.  Below are pictures of our students creating the number cards which will later be used to create our very own handmade calendar.

We also opened a fun art project center today. This was to create a mural full of dots. This mural and a great story inspired students to begin to mix colours and they are starting to wonder what colours can be mixed to make new colours. This will be experimented with in the next few weeks.