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.

 

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.

 

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.

St Patrick's Day Discovery 2014

Today we were lucky enough to have our local kindergarten round to visit us for Discovery. We spent the morning catching up with Totara Park Kindy friends and exploring lots of St Pat's Day crafts and activities. 

 

 My favourite activity was the very cute leprechaun spoon puppets.  

After our Discovery session we had a fantastic shared morning tea. The children's eyes lit up when they spied their special morning tea, it didn't last long before disappeared!

 

Teddy Bears' Picnic 2014

Our teddies and other assorted soft toys came to visit school today, they stayed for a picnic during our Discovery session. 

Our teddies enjoyed all sorts of different teddy and picnic themed activities; fruit cutting, teddy box cars, icing teddy biscuits, hanging clean teddy washing, play dough with teddies, and teddy ear head bands.

 These teddy bear face biscuits are super easy and just right for our five year olds and four year old Mountaineer visitors to make by themselves. One plain biscuit, reasonably stiff icing, 3 chocolate buttons, and eyes and a mouth with those icing gel pens. They were very cute, and most were nibbled on before they even made it to the picnic blanket.

Another, bigger Teddy Bears' Picnic is on this Saturday 8 March at Harcourt Park from 2.00 till 5.00 (at the Cossie if it's wet!). Check out page 37 of our local paper for more information.

Next week for Discovery our local kindergarten are coming to visit, we will be very busy!

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!

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.

Happy Matariki

 We celebrated Matariki today for our Discovery session. Matariki is a group of seven stars (the Pleiades) found in the winter sky just before dawn and signals the start of the Maori new year.

Check out my Matariki post from last year. 

We made happy matariki door hangers to hang on our doors at night.

 

We made Maori kites. Flying kites connects the land and the sky. Our kites won't be able to fly, but the children had a great time cutting flax to the correct lengths and stapling the flax onto a cardboard frame. This type of kite is our attempt at a Manu Taratahi design.

We made recycled poi from newspaper and a plastic bag. Wrap a ball of newspaper in a piece of plastic cut from a plastic bag, then tie on a piece of string.

We also watched some traditional Maori poi dances on the interactive whiteboard. This song is a classic!

We cut stars from sparkly playdough.

We stamped stars on black paper. Some children stamped just seven stars for the seven stars of Matariki, but this artist stamped a whole sky full.

 

We made tiki necklaces. This was one of the most popular activities, and they were worn all day!

Butterflies and Caterpillars

Our Discovery session today involved exploring caterpillars and the amazing process they go through to become butterflies. 

Check out some of our Discovery activities:

Matching butterfly wings on the interactive whiteboard, we used this website.

 Butterfly collage with tissue paper and sequins. 

 Butterfly and caterpillar chalk drawing on the concrete outside our classrooms.

 Smallest to largest cutting and pasting.

 Caterpillar necklace threading.

 Dot-to-dots, I encourage the children to use a ruler for this dot-to-dot, it is quite a tricky skill to learn.

 Cute fingerprint caterpillar wrist bands.

 Symmetrical butterfly painting. We discussed today how butterflies wings are the same on each side, like our faces - that makes them symmetrical.

Playdough caterpillars.

 Caterpillar and butterfly face painting. A fantastic mother of one of the children in my class came in today to paint the children's faces. The kids loved choosing their insect and its colours.