Winter Wonderland

 Our new winter wonderland grotto is waiting for those ready to brave the cold!

 We explored our new (to us) light box.

 We used tongs to sort these winter marbles and soft cotton wool balls into muffin tins.

 We cut out paper snowflakes.

 Who is hibernating under these leaves for the winter?

 We made playdough snowmen.

 One of our favourite activities was making this Season Spinner.

 We dressed paper dolls in warm winter clothes, this paper doll is wearing leather boots and winter mittens.

 We made winter decorations using milk bottle lids and plenty of glitter.

Discovery is always a highlight of my week and it was great to see the children happy and excited for our first Discovery session of term 3. We had lots of new visitors today and some of our mountaineers from last term are now big school children. I was very proud to see our J-Block children showing the pre-school mountaineers how we do things at school and helping them to discover the different experiences on offer.

Under the Sea 2013

J-Block children were busy selling tickets to visit the aquarium this morning for Discovery. Rocky and Ceena were temporarily relocated to Room 2, because, what's an aquarium without fish?

We watched this amazing aquarium video. 

We looked closely at different shells ....

... and sorted them.

We discovered that fish come in a variety of patterns and colours. We attached fishing line to our folding fish so they can swim in the breeze (or be caught for dinner!).

We blew bubbles for bubble art. Check out this post for how to make your own bubble art. Remember to blow, not drink!

We made paper plate whales and glued on whale facts on the back. Did you know that blue whales are the largest animal ever, even larger than the biggest known dinosaur.

These sea turtles are made from walnut shells and cardboard. Look at this careful cutting around the flippers.

We made these fingerprint fish, one fingerprint for the body and two for the tail. Check out some of our other fingerprint art; shamrock cards, thumb bunnies, hungry caterpillar wristbands, and autumn fingerprint trees. (Just scroll down if you need to.)

We coloured and labelled turtle diagrams.

 We followed these instructions and learned how to draw a fish.

Star Block Prints

For the past two weeks we have been working hard on our star print art. This term the children have been experiencing different types of print making, and as the term has gone on our print making efforts have gotten more and more ambitious.

 

 Printmaking is an interesting process for children to follow. Often it's not an instant result and can require patience, not something your average 5 year old has lots of! Our cardboard prints today were part of a two step process. 

To make a cardboard print something has to be done to the 'block' before you can produce an effect on another surface - the paper. Last week we used different textured paper and card to create a cardboard block to print from, and today we printed them.

I wanted the children to understand that when you create a print you can make more than one piece of art, and that's what makes it different from other types of art. The children printed two prints today, one for school and one for home.

We cut stars, moons, suns, and other 'space' shapes to glue to our cardboard blocks. After they dried we used printing ink to roll on our blocks and printed them onto paper. 
 

We used black ink on coloured paper, but you could use coloured ink on black paper too.

Have a look at some of the other print making we have done in our classroom:

Turtle cake tin printing 
Shaving cream egg prints

Matariki star sponge prints

Apple prints

Fingerprint shamrock cards

Footprint bees

Bubble art

Dinosaur Stomp

Dinosaurs were stomping and stamping in J-Block this morning. Check out our Dinosaur Discovery.

 Dinosaur eggs were carefully carried in our egg and spoon obstacle course. We discovered that dinosaurs hatched from eggs.

 We discovered that a stegosaurus has armoured spikes to protect it from predators.

 Totara Park Library was open and the librarians were busy issuing dinosaur books (and making important phone calls).

 

Dinosaur feet.

Dinosaur shadow puppets....

.... and puppet show.

Dinosaur finger puppets. 

Did you know? Some dinosaurs had two feet for walking on, and some had four.

Fossil digging, we discovered that people who dig up and study dinosaur fossils are called paleontologists.

We also enjoyed playing these Dinosaur Train games on the laptop computer and interactive whiteboard.