Little explorers

We have bunnies in the cert room!! We saw them sleeping and learned a little about their colours and their age. We also saw how they live. We were not allowed to touch them yet because they are just babies but it was a great activity! We cannot wait to watch them grow!

Spring is clearly in the air with all this rain!

Some of us have embraced the rain and we have explored areas of the ravine with ALL our senses (well okay just not the sense of taste). We have explored how mud feels under our feet vs grass and how we can use our gross motor skills to safely explore the different areas. Check out some of the photos!

We also found some cool rocks in different shapes, we saw our breath due to the temperature difference, we even safely explored the water.

(Team work-friends helping one another)

We have also been using the rain to explore an umbrella craft and do some writing.

Some of us do not like rain...so we decided to share with all of you that it is okay that some do and some don't.

(Different materials that helped us learn to blend colours by rubbing to create art posters)

Self regulation at its finest-not enough room at the table no problem "let's work together"!!

One popular sensory exploration area was the nail colouring center! What a blast. We used water colours and included everyone to have a sense of belonging.

(Non toxic water colours that easily wash off with soap and water).

More fun to come...hope you enjoyed our update!

A survey on who likes rain and learning to write numbers as: a number, a word, and a picture.

Helping build a new play area

"Kids gone wild"

We saw this tweeted by the company helping HCDSB build outdoor spaces for our FDK communities and we found it to be an amazing video with an inspiring message. The article is also fantastic! Take a few minutes from your day and have a looksie.

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/dateline/story/kids-gone-wild

Eco Friendly learning

The teachers were out and about learning about nature and nature play yesterday and we are starting to incorporate more of what we learned into our activities. Today was a beautiful day so we took FULL advantage of it. We did want to share a great article about outdoor play and it's benefits so that at home you can encourage more of it.

http://www.earlychildhoodnews.com/earlychildhood/article_view.aspx?ArticleID=275

We must say our experience at the RBG was incredible and we highly recommend taking your children there to explore their natural playground. Many of our HCDSB schools are slowly getting these and the learning that can happen in them is amazing. We will also be trying to use loose pieces to start to build our own natural learning areas. Just keep an eye out as we will slowly start to add to our outdoor space. Today we already started and we had some students do some amazing problem solving. They realized that carrying logs together is quite difficult but ROLLING them was easier. We thought about how heavy they are and why this method was easier. We also learned that rolling up hill is a lot harder than downhill. So much great learning went on when hunting for cool logs for our playground.

The cutest part here was when one student later said "God's nature is the best nature ever!"

We also had students create some amazing art pieces. Can you guess what they are?

We will be continuously using these art pieces and our smart board to explain them to the class (student idea!).

Check out all the writing! We sure do love using all these great resources to learn.

Another student found a log piece that they decided looked like a rainbow. We will continue to use nature to inspire us creatively.

We also decided to be amazing stewards of the earth and help clean up our yard for earth day but along the way we found bike racks to balance on, we learned about wind and how it helps blow up our bags, we found mystery sand and explored our sense of touch, and best of all we worked amazingly as a team!

Where did this sand come from?

Some of the parents have asked about where we were yesterday...we already said we were at the RBG learning more about how to use outdoor play to learn...check or our rock stories, mud pies, and creative building...

You should all go explore this amazing playground:

Finally, if anyone has an old tire or two that could be reused for planters let us know.

Thank you all for being amazing!

PPS we need 200 more bags to get to a 1000 in our class! Tomorrow is the last day so let's get those plastic bags in!!