Week 15: Gingerbreads and Snowflakes

I cannot believe that the winter holidays are almost here; term one has flown by! This week was "gingerbread week" in the Early Learning classroom, among other things. Some girls were making intricate designs with materials in the classroom, and others were creating snow structures on the roof. We also enjoyed spending time learning with the grade 1-2 class, doing things like building a winter village, cutting out cookies, and going to the Deer Park public library for a holiday story time. Take a look at our fun week together. 

A enjoys the sun-lit colours from under the parachute at morning recess.

P adds bears to her playground because there "need to be kids there to climb". She takes such care in placing the bears one by one on her creation, ensuring not to knock any of them over. 

G creates a sign for the "Toy Workshop" after working with A to represent the North Pole on the Light Table.

P loves using the BINGO game. She has figured out which direction will release the BINGO balls, and also makes sure not to spin it too quickly.

K shorts through the coins for loonies and toonies. She explains that these ones are important for buying things.

Hooray for snow!

Sarah, our student teacher (and Linden Alum) teaches her first lesson in the classroom. She takes the girls through Math Calendar while they eat snack, and here they are counting up to 62. 

Last week we talked about feelings and emotions, and we took some fantastic photos of the girls for each state. Today we are adding labels to the photos so that we can put them up on our wall and use them to help us communicate. 

A works on her "binary necklace" during CERES today. Last week, she found the binary code for each of the letters in her name. Today she is converting the 0s and 1s to dark and light beads, and putting them on in the order of the code.

A watches the shortbread cookies after she's done helping make them in cooking club.

A works with Sarah to create a structure at Math this morning. After a lot of trial and error, and re-engineering her creation, A presents the transforming tower she has made. The final product even has wings to fly through the air.

P and A ride in their car on the way to the show. 

P and A prepared a play while at the Drama Centre and wanted to invite the grade 1-2s over to watch. Everyone was given a ticket, and all of the girls were supportive of P and A's production.

It is a winter wonderland on the roof, and A power pushes the giant shovel through the snow.

The crew is adding onto a snow mountain created by the grades 4, 5, and 6 students. These girls alternate between carving out the hill and sliding down the hill.

G concentrates as she navigates her way through the Paint program on the computer. She knows the basics and is working on adding colourful text to her design. 

This afternoon the grade 1-2s have joined us to collaboratively build a winter village. K works away on her palace, which has an entry-way for the cars and special gems to control the traffic.

P and G both add marble runs to the winter village. They enjoy experimenting with how the marbles roll down the ramps and designing tracks that will hold the marbles in.

G presents her work to the rest of the group. Look at all of the amazing and detailed structures that the girls have co-created to make an expansive winter village. 

At the end of the day A has her doll, Sarah, strapped in for the trip down to aftercare.

This is one of my favourite pieces of art that I have seen G create. She started with the edge colours, then worked incredibly slowly and carefully on the centre stripes. Throughout the entire process, she explained that she didn't know what she was making, but in the end G was so proud of her work.

It is once again "dog day" with Brie, and we were so excited to get a chance to say hi to Roxie and Whiskey before they hung out in the art room. 

During the Ada Lovelace All School today, K and G volunteered to be made into robots by their families. Together, they recited their family name in binary code (a long string of 0s and 1s). 

P uses all of her strength to roll out the gingerbread dough to the right thickness. She's giving the "come on, please help me" look, but knows that she is doing a great job.

G works with Sarah to cut out the cookies after the dough is completely rolled out. Together with P, and some help from the grade 1-2s, we made close to 100 gingerbread cookies!

This morning we keep our snow pants on because we are heading up to the library for a story time. I'm showing P some of the pictures of the girls that I have on my computer, and asking her which might look good in the blog.

We are at the library for a holiday story time this morning. The girls loved hearing some new stories from the librarian.