Weekly Activities

We baked gluten free cookies, then decorated them with special icing and sprinkles. It was February, so we talked about friendships, caring and love. We decorated hearts with special messages and love notes for friends and family. We tried out different methods of making masks. These ones, we used loose parts. We experimented with different pieces to be used for facial features. After trying out different ways our mask/face could look, we glued the loose parts down. Our school is beautifully painted to look like our surrounding forest. We headed outside to spot some key paintings that are on our building. Trees, stumps, animals and moss were found. We created our own Creative Minds out of shoe boxes. We chose colours that we saw on the building, like brown, green and blue.  The children were very pleased with the final result. They put school furniture inside and used the boxes for ima

We watched a video about how people used to make butter with a butter churn. Here's the video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaXjq9Qf4z8  There's no sound, so I kinda narrated it as we watched. The children drew pictures of farmers, milk in pails, and wooden butter churns. We then watched a video about how butter is made now with machines. Here's the video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHl_pHjT3d  I skipped a bit of it and focused on the machine that mixed the milk, and the packaging machine. The children then drew pictures of the machines we saw and the farmer. You can see their drawings up on the wall at CM. The next day we made our own butter. We poured some whipped cream into two containers. Then we started our shaking the jars. We stood in a circle and danced and moved our bodies while we listened to upbeat music. We did about 20 minutes of shaking. Our arms were really tired! I had prepared 6 songs to dance to that all had a 'shake shak

Mary Wore Her Red Dress. This song is well known to the children at CM. It's a song that I use quite often to transition from one activity to another. Today we dove deeper into the 'game' part of the song. I started by looking around at our group of children. Looking to see if an article of clothing caught my eye. I said, I'm looking at Saige's shoes. Saige would you mind to stand up here and show us your shoes? She said yes, and then came to stand next to me. Raise your hand if you have a way to describe Saige's shoes. Some children said running shoes or pink shoes or fast shoes. I asked Saige what term she would like to use for her shoes. She said she'd like to call them pink shoes. I asked her if she would mind if we sang about her shoes. She smiled and agreed. I wrote her name on the big piece of paper and drew her shoes. We found two types of pink in the box and most children agreed the light pink was most like the her shoes. She helped pick the c