Leapin' Lizards!!

As the year winds down, we are still in full learning mode! This past week we had a wonderful visit from A Reptile Show! It was great and the children learned so much! The presentation focused on the needs of these unique animals and just how difficult they are to care for. 
The man doing the presentation,(Jason) rescues various reptiles and cares for them and then finds them a new home or keeps them and takes them around to teach children about reptiles. It was excellent! 

This tortoise was rescued and brought back to health

This monitor lizard was raised from a tiny little lizard and he could get even bigger! 

This beautiful snake is almost extinct! There are very few left in the wild.

The children got to touch each one of the animals. It was interesting to listen to the children talk about how the animals skin felt, words like smooth, bumpy and cool.  

Most children were surprised that the snakes were not slimy at all! 

When pigs fly!!!

Our piggies are finished and they are up and flying around our room! We worked on painting them and adding in special details to make our pigs UNIQUE! They are so adorable! 
We began by painting them a bright pink! We hot glued a curly pink tail and then added things like ribbon rosettes, fake flowers, glitter and other details! One even had a Viking helmet made out of paper and one had a cool eye patch! He was a pirate flying pig! 

hot gluing the tails on!

3 little piggy tails!

Painting our piggies.

Add more paint!

Cover up all those white spots! 

Look how cute we are!!

Waiting on the drying trays before we take flight!

Flying pirate piggy! Notice the eye patch!

Flying around the room! 

Papier Mache .... the modified way!

Yes...I am a little crazy! I started a papier mache project with my kids. It actually wasn't that bad! I mixed white glue (from the dollar store) with water. Then the kids dipped strips of white photocopy paper into the glue mixture and wrapped it around a mini pop bottle. 
                                         We are making little flying PIGS! 
Right now they are drying and we will paint them next week and add details. Then we will hang them from the ceiling in our classroom! They look so cute right now and they aren't even painted yet! I will take photos of the finished product as soon as they are FLYING around our room! 

We started our pig making by tightly rolling paper legs and then hot gluing them to the mini bottles. Then we cut out ears and hot glued the ear shapes on.

Then we papier mached!! 

Some of my little darlings really did not like the feeling of the "goopy" glue, so they 

needed a little help to get going with the wrapping and to show them that the glue wasn't all that bad! So I dove right in too! 

I love the BIG ears on this one! 

Aren't they so cute? 

Everyone wanted to make one, so we had them drying everywhere! Some were on trays, some were on our drying rack. 

Can't wait till they are painted up and detailed and then FLYING!

In my opinion...

We have been writing about our opinions. So we started with writing about our opinion about the BEST pet. We started by learning all about just exactly what an opinion is and then deciding which pet we liked better and why we thought that opinion. After we wrote our opinion, we painted a picture of the pet of our choice. 

A visit to the Farm!

We went on one of our last field trips to a local farm for kids. It was a lot of fun! The day was very sunny and I even got a little bit of a burn. (yikes). Our favourite part of the trip was feeding and petting the new baby donkey, named Jose. He was so cute!! 

We learned how to feed horses and all about what they like to eat.

We fed baby lambs and learned about their needs.

We fed a Jersey cow.

We touched some baby ducklings and learned about what they eat.

The farm also had this wonderful bouncy thing built right into the ground! 

It was very fun! 

The Farm day was a lot of sunny fun! 

Splat the Cat!

We have discovered Splat the Cat stories! We really like him, so we each painted our own Splat! I think they turned out super cute! 
I made sure to emphasize that we need to paint carefully, like real artists and make sure not to "injure" our brushes. Our brushes like to say "Oooh and Ahhh", not "OUCH!" 
Once the painting were dry, we cut them out and glued on wiggly eyes. Kids art is so awesome! 

Fairytale castles!

We have been busy! So busy...I haven't been posting in a while! Well, I am back with some photos! We are exploring Fairytales, so this has brought about building our own castles made from boxes and paper! These groovy kids are really into it! They love building and creating! I love how focused they are! 

This little person made a wall mounted bird cage inside her castle!

This little lady made a complete set of furniture for the inside of her castle.

Apparently this castle was scary and haunted!

This castle builder was so focused! 

This builder eventually made a moat and knights around his castle. 

This builder was creating an Owl castle!

The children and I created a rubric together so we could decide what makes up a "Mastery" castle. Everyone decided together and everyone knew what the expectations were. It was interesting to see which kids were working towards mastery and which kids didn't really care and got more caught up in the creating!