Frogsplorations...

 

So many explorations! Never enough time!

 

 Here is a little photo journey of some of our pre-primary explorations over the last few weeks... I hope you enjoy it.

 

 Salt-dough Frogs, Lily Pads & Father's Day Frog Pictures

We used a range of informational texts to help us design our frogs.

 

Our finished frogs! Aren't they gorgeous!?!

 

You might think our frog pictures were missing legs... and you'd be right, however, we left them off on purpose. Later we cut, folded and concertinaed our own frog legs and stuck them onto our frog's bodies. Then we glued our finished frogs onto the front of our very own Father's Day cards. They looked Amazing and each one was individually made by the kids :)

You can see some of the gorgeous cards here. And if you're wondering what the gift is that our cards are attached to... It's our frogs of course! What a great pressie for our dads! 

The frog fun never ends...

 Below you can check us out playing one of our word games during 'Word Work'.

 

 

For this game we had to flip picture cards with cvc (consonant-vowel-consonant) words and find them on our activity page. We worked together to hear each sound in the word and if we had the matching picture on our activity sheet, we carefully spelled the word under the correct picture.



You can see us using our 'robot arms' to segment each sound as we break the word up.



 

We then blend those sounds back together as we write the word.

 

We always talk and share our thoughts as we work with our friends.
 

 

We love helping each other learn when we get stuck and are also learning to be good leaders.



Can you see that beautiful smile saying ..."Yep, I'm learning how to write!"

 

What clever little frogs we have in Room 15!

 

An update on our butterflies and the wee pollywogs...

Did you know a pollywog is just another name for a tadpole?  :)

 





 

Here you can see them soon after hatching from their eggs.
They are feeding off the jelly eggs they emerged from.



 

Setting our last monarch butterfly free.

 

  

 Look very carefully at HIM... All of the other butterflies we had were girls. We know this one is a male because of the two little black spots you can see on his wings just next to his abdomen. These are like scent glands, tiny scales that emit a chemical during courtship.

 

How amazing is Mother Nature!? ... and what better way for children to learn and explore their world, than with real life experiences!

 

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Be sure to come back soon to find out all about our cool Zoo trip!

 

Sports Day

 

Wow! I think the last two weeks flew by as fast as the pre-primary kids on sports day!!

Sorry it's taken so long to keep you all updated with what's been happening around here but boy have we been busy!! We are super hard workers down here in Room 15 you know! :)

 

Firstly, check out some of the pictures of us participating in the whole school faction carnival...

 

Eagerly waiting for our turn to race.

Take your marks, get set, GO!

 

I hope you didn't blink! You might have missed it they were so super speedy!!

 

Racing at the faction carnival is always a fun event for the kids. They were all great sports and finished their races with BIG smiles on their faces, congratulating each other on their efforts. We had been training and practicing our running technique for a few weeks before the big day along with refining our amazing leopard crawling and hurdle jumping skills for our obstacle course event, which was also a big hit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What winners!

 

 

Kids Love School!

No seriously! Check out the gorgeous 'kids' in the classroom this morning! 

Meet Honey and Coco :)  They  were our surprise visitors, kindly brought in by Nicole and Carolyn (Kingsley folk) Both lots of 'kids' loved their cuddles, big kids too and no one wanted our little goat friends to leave! They were just too cute. 

We have been so lucky this term, with all of our amphibian, insect and animal guests!! 

Oh, and guess what? .... 

I Finally have FROGSPAWN! :D  (thanks Mrs H) So excited!  Don't forget to come on in and check it out. Take a look here, a really close look, can you see lots of little tadpoles in their jelly eggs??? 

Stay tuned for more exciting pre-primary explorations! 

 

Book Week, Bouncing Bunnies and Butterflies!!

What a busy week we just finished at Kingsley! I don't know about the kids but what I do know is that the teachers were definitely ready to recharge their batteries by Friday afternoon!!

Last week so many wonderful things took place at school. Firstly it was Book Week, so we continued discussing the role of authors and illustrators and shared many great books together. We went to the Book Fair and made a wish list of the stories we would like to buy and read and concluded the week with a celebration on Friday at the Book Parade.  Lots of us dressed up as our favourite book characters and brought along the story that our characters were from.

Here are the Room 15 teachers and children looking smashing as their favourite book characters!



From left: Mrs Clarkson as Nicholas Ickle from 'The Wrong Book', Me as the dog from 'If You Give A Dog A Donut', Miss Pitchford as Wally from 'Where's Wally?', Mrs Decristaforio as Dora from 'Dora The Explorer' and Mrs Arnold as 'Odette' from 'Swan Lake'.

Room 15 book characters!
 

Smurfette & Snow White

Our Super Heroes



Smurfette checks out Mog's cool flying broom

Our very own Cat in a Hat

My Book Week Winner!
How uncanny is the resemblance! hehe  :)   Love ya Mrs D!

 

 Bouncing Bunnies!

On Thursday, we had 2 very cute bunnies come and visit us for the morning, 'Brittany' and  'Love'. They were very well behaved and seemed to enjoy their cuddles from the very excited pre-primary children.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

... Our Butterflies Emerge!

You had to be there to witness the extreme excitement and amazement that the children displayed as they realized the butterflies were about to emerge from their chrysalises. Not only did we get to watch these caterpillars shed their skin as they turned into a chrysalis, now we were able to watch them emerge as beautiful butterflies as well!

 

Here you can see the chrysalis just before it hatched.

   

 

The process was simply captivating - the children oohed and ahhed and watched ecstatically as these small butterflies left their chrysalis' with small, shriveled, wet wings.  Within moments, their wings grew slightly bigger as they softly lifted them up and down to dry them.

 

Look how tiny her wings are.

...A little bit bigger now.

 

 

  

It only took about 15 minutes for their wings to look smooth and flat, however, we knew they were not ready to fly away, as they did not have the strength to lift themselves upright.

 

Look how beautiful they are!

 

 

The children could not keep their eyes off the butterflies, so what better time to start our new butterfly observations.

 

Miss Pitchford guided the children as they made their observations, prompting discussion about what they saw and how they would create their butterfly diagrams. The children were very observant and decided they would only need a few colours for their pictures.

 



   

 

 

 

 

 You can see how carefully the children are looking at the butterflies as they draw their pictures. They really did do an amazing job!

 

 

 

As always, the children have learned so much this week but I have to say, becoming parents to 3 beautiful butterflies, and knowing there are still more on the way, was definitely the highlight of the week for me!! How exciting!