The Learning Bin

This morning we used three of our senses to figure out what "A" and "B" cups contained. We used our eyes to observe that both cups had white crystals. We use our fingers to feel that both cups held things that felt rough. The big differences came when we tasted. One was salty and one was sweet. Based on all of our observations we identified the substances as sugar and salt. To finish up our discussion we named different salty or sweet snacks and talked about how different people like different tastes.

A big shout out to the art teacher at my school who has been working with my kiddos once a week to create amazing visuals. This is a self portrait series that highlights emotions, can you guess what they are?

This year for the PTO fund raiser I made a giant mural/collage with the class.  We brain stormed everything that was in our community, and each cut out and decorated homes and buildings to add into the piece.  Once it was compiled and stuck down to a large cardboard sheet with glue, the teaching team mod-podge painted over the entire thing 3 times to get the seal and coverage we needed for it to survive in our humid climate. I especially like the swimming pool with the diver! This piece now resided outside the main door of the early childhood centre at our school.

This year for Halloween I had both families who were avid celebrators of the holiday, and those who did not celebrate it at all.  To find a nice compromise we did a book study of "Room on the Broom" written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Sheffler. I wrapped the idea around friendship and kindness rather than Halloween and everyone was happy. To make the bulletin board I used the fairy tale printable boarder from Sparkle Box UK, http://resources.sparklebox.me.uk/7000-8000/sb7597.pdf Then I layered construction paper to make the broom and took pictures of the students, teacher, and aides all sitting sideways on a chair against a blank background.  The children asked to add in the animals so I simply copied their pictures from our copy of the book. There are so many wonderful resources for this story and I can't speak more highly of the short film that was made in 2012, it is wonderful!

The b bells were not as successful as I had hoped.  The transposition of the letter happened for most of the children in the class, and the idea of a ringing bell wasn't something that was part of their reality.  For next time around I'm thinking of doing a /b/ with bat wings.

There was a great deal of excitement about my birthday in the classroom, so I promised the class a treat. First we observed 3 different cookies: Then we made notes on our observations. After that we tasted and picked our favorites: The three flavored in order were: 1. Molasses buckwheat 2. Oatmeal strawberry 3. Carmel chocolate chip And with a tie breaking vote from the principal the grand winner is the molasses buckwheat!

This year the learning standards for my PK class include both upper and lower case letter identification.  Usually in the past I have focused on one or the other depending on if I was teacher Handwriting Without Tears or Jolly Phonics.  So after the success of the upper case letter collages, I began our fourth spiral of the alphabet with lower case letters.  For reference sake the first spiral was using the Starfall curriculum and their web resources (starfall.com), the second spiral was the upper case alphabet collage book, the third pass was working on our upper case letter writing using the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum, and now enter our fourth spiral: 

What would the world be like without beauty such as this? Think twice before using products with palm oil in them, because places like this are disappearing in favor of palm plantations. Stop buying these products and the cutting of jungle will not be profitable. Location: Tesso Nilo National Park, Sumatra Indonesia

If you are patient and thoughtful, the small and beautiful bits of our world will take notice.