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.

 

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! 

Amazing Abstract Shape Art

This term we have been learning about shapes, in celebration of this we created these amazing abstract shape pictures.

 

 I asked the children to chose several shapes to carefully trace around, making sure to overlap the shapes to create a new smaller shape. They used pastel to colour each shape a different colour before painting dye over the whole picture. The children then selected one small shape to cover with glitter.

 

 I can't take credit for this great art idea, but check out this blog post by Use Your Coloured Pencils.

Watermelon Art

Welcome back! School has started for 2014 and we have been very busy in Room 4; learning routines, practising games, writing, reading, singing, counting, playing, and making art. Luckily at the start of the year I have a very small class, only 10 children. This means that I can spend lots of one-on-one time with each child in my class, which I really enjoy. 

With lots of children starting school with us during this term I will have about 15 children by the end of February, so it is important now that I focus on establishing routines and expectations that all the children understand about how my classroom is going to work. As the year goes on older children in my class are able to show our pre-school visitors and other children new to school how things work in Room 4. This makes life easier for me and gives the children a feeling of responsibility and an opportunity to show leadership.

 

 

 This week we made watermelon out of paper plates and coloured paper. Sadly, they don't taste as nice as the real slices of watermelon that we ate and wrote about at the start of the week.

 

Christmas Craft - Handprint Christmas Tree

Look what we made with our S-Block buddies. 

 They came over this afternoon to make something special with us. It was lovely to see the older children helping their younger buddies. My 5-year-olds are always excited to have 'buddy time.' 

The children outlined each others hand straight on to green paper, and after working together to cut it out they decorated their hand with crinkly green paper and glitter.

Boom, Wizz, Pop ....

(Imaginary) fireworks were exploding in J-Block this morning as we celebrated Guy Fawkes Night. Due to time constraints we were one day late, but we didn't let that stop us discovering about Guy Fawkes and fireworks.

 We painted our faces (and arms) with exploding fireworks and colourful sparklers. We also used cupcake cases to make a fireworks collage, this was a great cutting activity.

 We used dye, pipettes, and straws to make a huge mess colourful fireworks on paper. 

 

We made a Guy out of baby clothes and newspaper to push around in our toy stroller asking, "A penny for the Guy," and some children even gave us play money. In the doll hospital we took care of our dolls who had burns from the fireworks. This poor dolly is covered in plasters!

One very popular activity was making sparklers with chocolate finger biscuits and 100's and 1000's. Just dip one end of the biscuit in hot water, then quickly dip it in to the 100's and 1000's.

And my favourite activity - shooting the toy rocket into the sky, almost like real fireworks.

I can hardly believe we only have 4 more Discovery sessions this year!

Making Pizza

Our classroom turned into a pizza shop yesterday.

This term we have been learning how to make, read, and write fractions so we were sure to cut our pizza into halves and quarters to enjoy for lunch.

Yum!!!

We also cut our paper plate pizza into halves....

and quarters.

And we enjoyed watching the experts twirl pizza dough. Check out this amazing pizza dough spinning clip:

Fairytales

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and The Three Little Pigs are some of the fairytales we explored today for Discovery.

Can you spot which activity supports which fairytale?

 Material collage for Cinderella's ballgown and magic-wand making.

 Fairy biscuits with 100's and 1000's.

 Three Little Pigs and their houses.

 Porridge tasting, just like Goldilocks!

 Two sleeping beauties in Sleeping Beauty's bed.

And the big bad wolf!


Today was our last Discovery session for this term, next term we have lots more exciting Discovery activities planned, including Halloween, Mickey Mouse's Birthday and Christmas.
We will also have lots of new Mountaineers (our pre-school visitors) joining us. I am looking forward to seeing their happy faces during their school visits.

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.

Trains, Planes, and Automobiles

 Trains....

 Look at this amazing 'name train' created by one of our Mountaineers (a pre-school visitor). I think she did a great job completing each of the different steps, cutting first, then arranging, and finally gluing, and beneath those boxes she wrote her name - one letter for each carriage.

Planes....

Paper planes made for lots of gliding flying fun, which continued during morning tea. (At least our Principal won't have to go up on the roof to retrieve these planes, unlike the many balls and frisbees he gets down for us.)

 I love these peg planes, we used permanent marker to colour our pegs, but if you have enough time you could also paint them.

and Automobiles....

 Careful cutting and folding practise helped to make these cute paper cars.

 Making tyre tracks with paint. We put the paper in a shallow cardboard box to contain any mess.

 The children enjoyed driving box cars around our chalk road outside J-Block.

 And my favourite, check out these brand new scooters that were ridden non-stop for all of our discovery session. We were lucky enough to be able to purchase 3 scooters for the children in J-Block to ride during Golden Time and Discovery.

I was very pleased to observe the children taking turns using the scooters, asking politely for a go, and waiting patiently for their turn to start. They were actively practising some of our school values - cooperation and inclusiveness. These values are not something that always comes naturally to 5 year olds, but are attitudes that we continuously promote and model during our school day.