We hope that you had a wonderfully relaxing and fun-filled family holiday! The rest was much needed and allowed us to store up new energy to help us keep up with the children's exciting adventures.
Thank you for sending your child with warm clothing! Please ensure that they have something to keep their necks warm. As you can see, we will continue to spend a lot of time exploring the outdoors. Experiential learning is the best way to learn and retain information. When children experience activities and ideas firsthand it makes learning so much more fun and keeps everyone engaged.
One hour spent outside today lead to many new and exciting discoveries that would have been impossible if we stayed in all day. At -15'C we noticed that the snow crunches and squeaks beneath our feet and that when the wind blows, the snow moves like sand. We also discovered that it is not a good temperature to make snowballs or snowmen. The temperature needs to be closer to 0'C to be packing snow. We also learned that we need to keep our bodies moving during colder temperatures and stay covered up in order to keep warm. Our students should sleep well tonight. I know we will!
The children were very excited to find many types of animal prints left in the snow. This lead to a great adventure in the forest. Some of the children thought that we might have found rabbit, squirrel, deer, coyote, dog, wolf, and bear prints. We will have to advance our learning through books and the Internet to discover whether all of these animals live in this area and whether the prints we found match.
We walked by the frog pond and discovered that it is covered in a layer of ice. We talked about water safety, especially during the colder months, and how important is it to never try walking on the ice.
Journalling is an important part of expressing our learning through pictures and writing. Drawing pictures is an important step to literacy skills. As your child's drawings become more detailed, we can see the nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs that develop. Bravo les amis ! We also continue to learn about parts of a fictional story and have begun retelling stories in various ways.
Our class will be cooking again and we will be creating a community soup and baking some bread. If possible, please send in a vegetable, grains, or broth. Children get very excited when they can contribute to our soup! Merci !
It was amazing to see how great the children were with routines and cooperative play today. This certainly is an amazing class and makes coming back to school so pleasant!
Stay warm and have a wonderful day! Bonne journée !