Happy Leap Day

I meant to post this yesterday, but happy leap day!

We celebrated February 29th by making these froggy headbands with long paper tongues with our Maunga buddies.

Our buddies from Maunga are year 6 children and visit us once a week on Mondays after lunch. The children like to read to them and play games, and at playtime they will come and say 'hi'.

Capital E Arts Festival Trip

Yesterday the whole of our Junior Syndicate traveled into Wellington to see three amazing shows as part of the Capital E Arts Festival. First up we saw Carnival of the Animals, a fantastic acrobatic circus performance.

After our guide escorted us to Te Papa Museum we enjoyed a quick morning tea before seeing...

 And after lunch we walked through town to Paramount Theatre and the children danced to Orchestra of the Spheres.

It was such a busy day that on the bus ride home I counted 3 children fast asleep!

Cat and Bird Art

 Cat and Bird (1928) Paul Klee

Our amazing Cat and Bird art is up in the office. I was inspired by this post at Rumriver Art Center. We used paint rolled on with a roller, vivid marker, and pastel.

I really enjoy mixed media art projects with children, and Paul Klee is great inspiration. I used Paul Klee's Senecio portrait as a model for some amazing self portraits that I created with my class last year. Thanks to Use Your Coloured Pencils.

Outdoor Week

Check out some of our outdoor week photos. We have been so busy, I was falling asleep straight after dinner! Just like the children.

Staglands....

 Kite making and flying....

Watching the raft race....

Chalk people....

We also dug for treasure, walked to the duckpond and feed the ducks, exploded the air rocket, played on the playground, and made rock art. 

Mini Beasts and Creepy Crawlies

Today we were very lucky to have an entomologist (a scientist who studies insects) come to Discovery and bring some amazing bugs and insect resources for us to explore. 

We had fun catching mosquito larvae to take home, then looking at real live locusts, spiders, mosquitoes, snails, and worms. The children used a microscope to look closely at insects set into resin.

When we have visitors come to school to share their knowledge the children are fascinated to talk to them and enjoy the opportunity to learn from experts. Luckily our entomologist is a parent and volunteered his time and resources. 

If you have something (knowledge, resources, or time) to offer us for Discovery please mention it to a teacher. We would love to have you help out.

Today was also a special session as we had lots of new Mountaineers start their school visits. We call our pre-school visitors Mountaineers as they are 'scaling the heights of learning'. It was great to meet lots of new children and their parents. We encourage parents to stay for our Discovery session to provide support for their children, after a few sessions it is a good idea for parents to leave for a short time before returning for morning tea at 10.30.

Waffles and Bird Feeders

Last week for our Exploration Time Discovery session we made delicious waffles and delicious (for the birds) pine-cone bird feeders.

We had three waffle makers for our waffles and used this waffle recipe, it made close to 20 waffles so if you want to make less waffles try this website. We poured maple syrup or golden syrup over our waffles and the children enjoyed eating them up quickly before the syrup dripped everywhere. 

We have made these bird feeders before and the birds love them. Because we had lots of expired peanut butter donated to us the children coated their pine-cone in peanut butter before rolling it in bird seed. You can use margarine if there are concerns about nut allergies. 

 

The birds went nuts for their bird feeders and they were stripped of peanut butter and bird seed within 4 days. 

The Friendly Games

 Our 'Friendly Games' Discovery session was busy this morning with lots of Commonwealth Games inspired activities that encouraged the children to practise their friendship skills.

 

 Here we are completing a mountain biking dot to dot, last night New Zealand came 1st and 2nd in the mens mountain biking!

 

 The children enjoying taking turns on the fitness circuit.

 And this is my personal favourite - Judo Jaguar!

As the Commonwealth Games are in Scotland this year the children used blue paper triangles to complete the Scottish flag.

The children made these very cool highland terrier dogs - just like the real dogs that escorted the teams at the opening ceremony. 

 Photo from here.

These pipe cleaner people are ready to compete at the games, just use one pipe cleaner to make the head and legs, and bend another to make the arms. 

Dinosaur Discovery

Here are a few photos of what we got up to for our last Discovery session of term 2. Dinosaurs provided us with lots of inspiration and is always one of my favourite sessions. 

 

We dug for fossils in the sand trough, made paper plate dinosaurs (click here for details), cut dinosaur finger puppets, made mini-colouring-in books (thanks Sparklebox), helped our dinosaurs hatch out of eggs, and lots of fun with our plastic dinosaurs.

 

Puppets!

 Check out these gorgeous sock puppets! 

We made them the other day during our 'puppet' Discovery session, along with lots of other puppets....

I especially loved the shadow puppet shows.

Hero Discovery

We had a fantastic Hero Discovery session last week. We were very lucky to have some special visitors; a fireman, police officers, and 5 police dogs!

We practised our 'get down, get low, get out' fire safety procedure and talked about a safe meeting point. Later during the session the children got to make a fire-truck money-box and talk to Jamie the Fireman about his job. Some lucky children even got to try on his fire-fighting gear.

The police van came for us to explore and as a lucky surprise some police dogs dropped by for us to meet. We learned about how to pat a dog safely - after checking the dog is okay to pat with its owner, put your hand out for the dog to sniff and then scratch them gently under the chin or on the shoulder. After patting the police dogs we made some police dogs out of paper. Check here for dog origami instructions similar to what we used. We took our fingerprints, got to play with some real handcuffs, and try on a stab-resistant vest.

 

 We also turned into superheroes and practised saving J-Block!

Autumn Discovery 2014

Check out the amazing autumn activities we explored last Wednesday for Discovery; mini leaf booklets, laminated leaves, leaf boats, leaf rubbing, apple cutting with our special apple cutting machines, hibernating hedgehog art, autumn leaf creatures, and pine-cone critter craft!

I love the apple cutting machines. They peel, core, and slice an apple in one amazing go. Funny enough, the children are just as fascinated as the adults! 

Off to The Big Top!

 We put on our red noses and clown hats this morning and went off to the big top to perform in the J-Block Circus for Discovery this morning.

 The children made the clown hats from coloured card and stickers. Peeling and sticking stickers is a good fine motor activity to practise in preparation for writing.

 On the way to the circus we decorated popcorn cups and watched popcorn explode from the popcorn poppers! Yum!

We sold circus tickets in the ticket booth using our play money, and wore these circus masks from Sparklebox.

We also coloured in mini circus books to take home and cut out these cute paper circus animals.

In Room 4 we have also been reading and practising the actions for this cute clown poem.

Folding Fish 2014

 These are the latest additions to our classroom - cute folding fish swimming merrily through the seaweed hanging above our home corner.

 We used crayon and dye wax resist to make these happy fish. 

First put the fish on a textured surface (you can get a copy from here), then use the side of a wax crayon to rub over the paper. We used the concrete just outside our classroom to create scales for our fish.

  

 

Carefully cut out the fish. When I teach children to use scissors I talk about a helping hand to hold the paper and a scissor hand to use the scissors. The helping hand moves the paper around as the scissors cut. It is important the the thumb stays in the top hole of the scissors and the next 1 or 2 fingers go in the bottom hole. You can also get left handed scissors for children who are left handed. 

 Use a brightly coloured dye to paint over the fish and create the wax resist. 

Once the fish is dry you can glue it to coloured paper and fold it together using the small slits by the tail.

We have also been reading this poem 'Once I Caught a Fish Alive.'

Caterpillars and Butterflies 2014

Check out the caterpillar and butterfly activities that we explored today for Discovery, and luckily, later on in the afternoon a monarch butterfly emerged from its chrysalis. Nearly perfect timing!

From the top left; butterfly wands, light box, Hungry Caterpillar story cards, butterfly sounds, painted symmetrical butterfly, egg carton caterpillar, butterfly net for bubble catching, chalk boards, more butterfly wands, chalk drawings outside, another symmetrical painted butterfly, and bubbles to catch in the butterfly net.

Meet Ruby Fish

Ruby moved into the fish tank with Rocky today. Already she is swimming around happily with him.

I picked her up at lunch time and after lunch the children and I discussed several possible names for our new fish before deciding on Ruby with a little help from our lovely office lady, Mrs Hunt.

Rocky is orange and Ruby is white and orange with black spots.