We made Christmas gifts for our families and the Hospital Residents this week. We wrapped our canvas’ in wool and sprayed watered down paint onto the canvas. Once the paint was dry we took off the wool to reveal a lovely pattern. Then we painted some wrapping paper and wrapped them up to put under our trees at home. Spraying the bottles required considerable finger, or thumb, strength.
Little Lilly noticed that we have little tiny lemons growing on our lemon tree. She observed that they will grow bigger and I added “and they will turn yellow.”
Wednesday morning was beautiful; weather and so we ate our morning tea outside under a shady tree. We had cherries on our share plate today. Lily commented, “I haven’t had cherries for a long time.” When I asked her why she said “Because it’s not the right time.” I said, “Yes, cherries are ripe in Summer” We also discussed that you could buy cherries at other times in the year but they are very expensive because they come from overseas.
Ten Apples Up On Top is a book by Dr Seuss. We use this book to reinforce oral and one-to-one counting to 10. Over two days we did two counting activities with this book. The first one had the numbers in order and the second one had random numbers. The children had to read the numeral and put the correct number of apples on the animals head (we did this by printing using paint and glue sticks). The first day the numbers were in order and we learnt that if we don’t keep our lines straight then we will run out of space at the end. So on the second day we tried to keep our lines straight. Why didn’t I rule the children lines? Because a big part of being a mathematician is organising the maths – so we keep the maths messy! Our columns we much straighter on day 2!
Lily found a stick insect on the way to Pre School yesterday. It was on a tap near the Senior Citizens building. We all went out to have a look. It had amazing with and green stripes on its body and it was very big. We had a good look at it with the magnifying glasses. What does it eat? Stick insects eat leaves – but not all leaves, each species has a favourite leaf they like to eat. It is called a stick insect because it looks like a stick and it has six legs like all insects.
Today we found a cricket inside the room. The girls feed it a variety pf plants and they tried to catch some flies for it – “because we don’t know what they eat.’ then they gave it some water. We learnt that crickets eat both plants and animals – they are omnivores.
We have been improving our scissor skills with lots of cutting practice recently. This week we practiced cutting play dough for something different.
This is a great story to introduce the concept of ‘sharing’ with the children. Each time the doorbell rings the children have to re share out the cookies so that everyone get the same amount. We used plastic people and counters to represent what was happening in the story. They children shared by ones and they learnt to go around the people until there were no cookies left.
The four year olds enjoyed the challenge of jumping on the footprints. The footprints faced different ways and they had to make sure they jumped to match the picture.
We enjoyed some Smartie Maths today. I modelled the task to the children. They had to draw columns on their paper, then sort their smarties into colours. Then they had to put the smarties into columns like a graph. We talked about most, more and less. The children compared the columns. Then we counted the number of smarties in each column and had a go at writing the numerals. Finally we counted how many smarties we had altogether. Some packets had more than others! And then we got to taste them.
Using inspiration from facebook, we practiced our cutting skills to create dogs and cats from magazines. The children had to cut out the pattern and paste it onto the magazine pages. Then they had to cut our the shapes again. They had fun putting the pieces together and then adding some collage for an extra dimension.