Express Yourself #5 - Practicing our Thinking Skills

 This week Water group had a blast exploring Mila's interest in pirates.

To begin, the children used their researched skills by collecting information from a variety of books about pirates. They found many interesting things and decided to organize all the facts and to create a book of their own.

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Express Yourself #4 - Express through songs

Coming up with the lyric

Little composers

This week Water group looked at Aiden's topic, the police. The children gathered and shared their knowledge of what they know about police.

Aiden: "They catch bad guys."
Cameron: "They wear badges and they have guns."
Alan: "They drive police cars."
Natalya: "They help people."
Enxin: "They make us feel safe."

Then we read the story Office Buckle and Gloria. During the story Peter asked, "There is a police dog? How do they catch people?" So we watched a video of how a police dog helps police officer catch a robber. The children were amazed at how fast the dog catches the robber and how well the dog listens to the officers.

Performing the song

After the story and the video, the children really wanted to express their gratitude to the police officers and Aiden chose to make up a song for them. The children came up with the words and the tune (with a piano app)  all by themselves. They were so proud of their song that they wanted to share it with the other groups.


Police Song
tune and lyric by Water Group
Police catches robbers
Police catches bad guys
Knock, knock, knock,
Knock, knock, knock.
They make us feel safe
and they're here to help us.
Thank you!

Express Yourself #3 - Family Poems and Letters

After talking to each other about their families, the water group put their feelings and thoughts about them into written words. Using the Smartboard, the children drew pictures and wrote a poem about their family. Not only did the children write poems, they wanted to express to each individual members in their family and one of the best ways to do that is to write letters. When the letters are done, we put a stamp on the envelope and put them in the postbox.

Express Yourself #2 - Express Through Talking

Water group is exploring Jayla and Natalya's interest in families.
First, the children told each other a little about the members in their families. Then they described their feelings for their family and why it is important to them.

Mila: I love my family because they help me.
Aiden: Sometimes I feel angry with my family because they cough on me.
Alan: I like my daddy and mommy because they play with me.
Jayla: I like to play with my brothers.
Peter: I like my family because they are good to me.


The children decorated cut out paper dolls to represent their family members. As they worked on the activity, they expressed more opinions about their family members.

At the end of group time, the children gathered and found out they have learned more about each others family by expressing through conversations!

Express Yourself #1 - How We Express Ourselves

Water group talked about different ways that people can express their ideas. The children looked through pictures and found people expressing feelings and messages through dances, paintings, music, conversations, books, photography and dramatization.

Enxin and Jayla like the idea of expressing themselves through dancing. Aiden likes music. Natalya likes painting. Alan loves photography and Peter likes dramatizing.

Each child picked a topic that they would like to explore. For the next 7 weeks, we will be exploring each topic and looking at different ways that we can express ourselves. The children have agreed to be open-minded and try different ways to express their topics.

Water Wonders #5 - How We Use Waterways

These are pipes.

 

To try and understand the Coast Salish use of waterways and the importance to their lifestyle, the children looked at the how we use waterways.
Natalya said: "We can swim in it."
Aiden said: "We can fish in it."
Cameron said: "Boats go in the water."

We focused on these three categories and thought of why people use the waterways this way.
Peter said: "It is fun to swim in the water." - recreation
Mila said: "We can eat fish." - food

We need to fish for food. 

Natalya said: "Sometimes you can go in the boat to fish." - transportation

After brainstorming our ideas, they painted a great river and constructed a community around it. It was amazing to see the children play with the structure when they were finished building. Some said they didn't have taps in the house so they had to go to the river to scoop water. Alan started building pipes in his house and this sparked an interest for Aiden to build one in his too. Jayla and Mila were concerned about food source so they were busy fishing. In the end, each of them made a little speech about how  they built their houses and why it's close to the water.

Giving a speech

This project helped us understand the importance of the Fraser River to the Coast Salish communities that surround it. Salmon fishing and canoe racing that exist today bring the communities together.

Easter Egg Hunt

Where are the eggs?

Easter is just around the corner and what fun is Easter without the Easter Egg Hunt! The children were told that the Easter bunny would come in the afternoon and hide all the chocolate eggs for them to find. In preparation for the hunt, we painted bunny baskets to store the eggs that we will find. After rest time,   the Easter bunny came and told Ann where the eggs were hidden so she could drew a map of the playground to help with the hunt. After taking careful looks at the map, the children rushed off to find the yummy chocolate eggs! They were all principled collecting the eggs to share equally with everyone. Not wanting to give up, the children were committed to find all the eggs but the bunny was just too tricky and we found all but one!

When the egg hunt was over, the children sat down to enjoy a chocolate pretzels nest treat made by Alexis and her mom. What a perfect day, lots of sunshine and chocolate!