Showing posts with label cards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cards. Show all posts

Tuesday, 10 June 2014

Queen's Birthday Discovery 2014

I love these royal masks, the J-Block teachers wore them last year for a funny staff photo, and last Wednesday for our Queen's Birthday Discovery session the children enjoyed wearing them too.
 
 We also made these beautiful crowns....


 ... and stunning brooches.

 

Thursday, 8 May 2014

Happy Mother's Day 2014

This Sunday our mothers are in for a treat!

Yesterday we were very busy making some special treats for our mothers....

 Brown sugar scrub for mum's hands....

 Beautiful flower cards made with a fingerprints and a button in the center....

 We also practised laying the table ....

And heaps of other activities.


What a busy start to our first Discovery session of Term 2.


Wednesday, 12 February 2014

Happy Valentine's Day!

 Every Wednesday morning we have a Discovery session. Our Mountaineers (pre-school visitors due to start school in the next 10 weeks) come to school for Discovery and have fun exploring and learning about the sorts of activities we do at school. We encourage mums and dads to stay with their children to make the transition easier, that means on Discovery days we have lots of extra adults in our new-entrant classrooms and all those spare hands are always appreciated, especially at clean up time.

 Today we learned about showing others we love them.

Look at all of the things we were busy making this morning at Discovery to celebrate Valentine's Day. I really enjoyed reading in inside of some of the Valentine's Day cards, the messages were very sweet. (I'm sure the recipients will enjoy them as much as I did.)

Of course today lots of children were also busy playing with the cars, making potato head people, playing trains, building lego, and playing tag outside. 


 Next week we are celebrating Chinese New Year.





Thursday, 21 November 2013

Happy Birthday Mickey Mouse!



We celebrated Mickey Mouse's birthday yesterday for Discovery, apparently he is 85 this year!

 Every party needs (playdough) birthday cakes and (real) candles, balloons, and of course Mickey was given lots of presents.

 We wrote cards for Mickey, and made mouse ear magic wands. One of my lovely parents gave us heaps of Disneyland themed paper plates and badges after her recent trip to Disneyland. The children had lots of fun setting the table ready for Mickey's party.
 
 We also had lots of fun painting mouse whiskers and making Mickey Mouse ears too. We were very lucky to have a parent stay and help out with the face painting. Lately we have had heaps of Mountaineers (our pre-school visitors) visiting us for our Discovery session, so it is fantastic to have some amazing parent help.

And in New Zealand a child's party is not complete without fairybread - bread, butter, and 100's and 1000's. Yum!



Wednesday, 30 October 2013

Happy Halloween!

 
 We had a blast dressing up for our Halloween Discovery session. (The teacher in the cow onesie is not me, but one of the other amazing teachers in J-Block.)

I always try to plan activities that encourage the children to practise a variety of skills and attitudes we use at school. Cutting, gluing, folding, drawing, writing, copying, sharing, turn-taking, persevering, taking risks, and helping others are some of what I observed during today's Discovery session. Discovery allows the children to discover about school, about our topic for the week, and what they themselves are able achieve.

Have a look at some of the activities we explored today:

 
 We blew up balloons and drew jack-o-lantern faces on them. I bought 90 orange balloons to ensure we had enough!

 We made paper-towel mummies, spider thaumatropes, folding bat cards, skull masks, icky insect wristbands, and tissue ghosts.

One of my favourite activities was using a permanent marker to draw jack-o-lantern faces on oranges. Which we got to eat for lunch, yummy.

We played Toca Boca Monster Kitchen on the ipads. This is a free app where you have to choose food for the monsters, cook it, and then feed it to them. Sometimes they don't like it and will spit it out all over the screen.  (That's the best part!)


Wednesday, 28 August 2013

Father's Day 2013

I hope our dads are ready to receive their amazing gifts this Sunday for Father's Day. The children had a great time making something special for dad or grandad during our Discovery session today.

We have been talking a lot during Discovery about perseverance, and how TP (Totara Park) kids try and try again if something is hard. I was pleased to see the children completing an activity even if it was tricky or had several different steps.

Have a look at some of our fantastic Father's Day activities:

 Portraits of dad with paint.

 Ties for dad to wear to work. All the shapes were cut from paper using special punches, then glued on.

 A paper rosette, each part of the rosette was coloured and cut out separately before being glued together.

 Certificates for dad or grandad from Sparklebox.

 Father's Day cards from Sparklebox.

 Playing My Playhome on the ipads. I love this app, it is just like a dolls house. You can change the clothes on the people, put them into bed, close the curtains, and turn off the lights. If the family feel hungry you can cook them dinner or make lunch.

Playing snakes and ladders with one of our Mountaineers (we call our pre-school visitors Mountaineers) dads.



Wednesday, 29 May 2013

Happy Birthday Your Majesty

Our Mountaineers had a great time celebrating Queen's Birthday for Discovery earlier today. The Queen turned 87 in April earlier this year, but we celebrate her birthday at the start of June.

 
 The Queen loves jewellery so we were busy making rings out of pipe cleaners and beads....


.... this was a good activity to practise our fine motor skills. 

We made paper flowers out of cupcake cases, a straw, and a button. This simple flower craft is fast to complete and we had some extremely colourful flowers. (Just remember to turn the cupcake cases inside out to you can see their colours and patterns easily.) 

Here is a smiley-face flower.

We made birthday cards. I love the flowers on this card.

We wrote shopping lists for party food, do you think The Queen would like a milo for her party?

We ordered Union Jack bunting.

 We wrote "Queen" words on the mini-chalk boards.

 We coloured, cut, and made our own crowns.

 We coloured Union Jack flags. I found these flags here.

 We made origami corgi dogs. Corgis are The Queen's favourite type of dog. Check out this post for more information about origami dogs.

Whew! What a busy session.


Did you know that you can send The Queen a card or letter? We try and do this every year and we always get an official reply on her behalf. Have a look at this website to find out how to contact The Queen.




Wednesday, 8 May 2013

Mother's Day 2013

With a very special day coming up this weekend we spent our first Discovery session of Term 2 discovering about our mums, what mums love, and how to show our mothers that we love them. 

Here are a few of the activities we enjoyed:

 Mums love flowers, so we made these simple hand-print lilies with white paper and pipe-cleaners. 

Cutting activities for Discovery encourage the children to use scissors to cut meaningfully. Knowing where your thumb and fingers go when holding scissors, how to open and close them, and how to hold what you are cutting in your other hand is something that seems to come automatically to adults, but may need to be explicitly taught and modelled to children. 
Your child can cut strips of paper into squares, cut along straight and wavy lines,or cut around shapes and pictures. They can cut paper, card, ribbon, or pieces of material. Using scissors that are the correct size for makes it all a little bit easier too and are worthwhile to purchase. Left-handed children may prefer left-handed scissors, or they may develop a technique that allows for right-handed scissors.


 To show that we love our mum, we screwed up small pieces of tissue and made a colourful heart collage.

 Mums love clothes (well my mum does), so we made paper dolls and dressed them in dresses using different patterned material. I love the happy faces and hair on the mothers in the second picture.

 Mums love jewellery, so we made beautiful flower bracelets, this bracelet is being modelled by the mother of one of our mountaineers. 

 One Mother's Day you can give a card to your mother, so we wrote cards to our mums.


Happy Mother's Day!

 Have a look at what we did this time last year for Mother's Day.



Wednesday, 27 March 2013

Easter Discovery

 This card says it all ... Happy Easter!

We had lots of fun today exploring different Easter activities....
 
 .... We were busy making bunny ears ....

 .... Then ordering eggs from largest to smallest ....

 .... and dyeing hard boiled eggs ....

 .... Then making a recycled Easter basket for our egg ....

 .... After that we cut and coloured our own Easter rabbits, I love how this bunny is holding a basket full of chocolate eggs.

We made pretend spring gardens with playdough and fake flowers, because one tradition of Easter is to celebrate new life and growth, and flowers grow in Spring ....

 .... Then we went outside to have 'egg' and spoon races over an obstacle course.

But a favourite activity was filling chocolate molds with chocolate ....

 .... and eating them.

Have a happy Easter.