Happy Canada Day! We sure do love our country! 
 
The kids are especially fascinated with the Canadian flag, so naturally we had to learn about the maple tree where the maple leaf comes from. We are very fortunate to have a maple tree down the street to look at. The owner of this maple tree also told us how the leaves change colour in the fall. That was quite exciting. We also learned how maple trees are tapped for its’ sap that is then turned into maple syrup. 
 
We enjoyed trying to sing to national anthem. The kids are adorable when they try to sing a song that they are not 100% familiar with.
 
We also learned a bit about Canadian money, particularly the coins although they did get to look at our ‘paper’ money as well. “Canada In My Pocket” is a song I remember from my childhood and they seem to enjoy it too. We talked about why the we don’t use the penny anymore, since that was the one with the maple leaf on it and they sure do like those. We learned about all of the symbols on Canadian coins and were particularly interested in the beaver. We learned about beavers’ teeth, what they use to build their dams, how they build their dams, what they do inside their dams, etc.

We learned so much about spiders; even things we were surprised by! The last photo in this week’s bunch will tell you all about it.
 
We made tin foil and pipe cleaner spiders, a human spider web and foam spiders that had two strings of yarn attached to the back of the spiders so they could “climb”. We also threaded yarn through holes in a paper plate to make a spider web for their tiny pipe cleaner spiders. We even used our letter construction pieces to build spiders.
 
When we weren’t learning about and making spider related crafts, we were making beaded bracelets and necklaces, building and playing with Lego, and playing a dice rolling game.
 
We spent lots of time out and about; “rock climbing”, exploring NoseHill Park, picking up lilac petals from multiple places, and had fun out in the field shooting Bella’s ball blaster for her and doing tricks with soccer balls.
 
The kids and I were very fortunate to come across numbers that were spray painted in the field. This was great for impromptu math/gross motor work. And, oh my goodness, where they ever a lot of mosquitos in the field! The kids decided they would all run from one soccer goal post to the other, not knowing that they would awaken so many mosquitos! The kids and I definitely got our exercise by running away and dancing the “mosquito dance”.

Happy Father's Day to all the Dads out there! 

The kids were busy this week getting ready for Father's Day. They were very proud of the gifts they made. They were creative, practiced their name writing and how to hold their writing utensils like a crocodile. 

Speaking of crocodiles... when we weren't working on Father's Day gifts, we were learning about crocodiles and alligators. We learned many facts we didn't know before! It was quite interesting to learn about the difference between the two.

The kids practiced building letters with wooden pieces and magnetic pieces, and played letter finding and matching games.

The kids love finding flowers and insects. There was a lot of ladybug finding and dandelion picking happening. We really do love exploring and finding new life in nature. I was instructed to take pictures of all the flowers they found on our adventures, which were quite a few! Over the past few weeks we have been watching as new flowers emerge and researching them online to see what they are called.

Bugs. Bugs. Bugs. This seems to be what the kids are really interested in these days. We have moved on from butterflies and ants to ladybugs and beetles (we learned a ladybug is a beetle actually). These kids will be little ecologists by the end of the summer!
 
We had a lot of fun learning about different types of beetles such as Dung beetles, Rhinoceros beetles and ground beetles, and where they live, what they eat, and their natural behaviours. It’s always exciting when they get to see what we are learning about in the real world. We were fortunate to come across ladybugs, worms, a caterpillar, always ants, and even a few ground beetles. Exploring nature has been one of the highlights of our warm spring days.
 
Together we made tiny bugs out of buttons, pipe cleaners and hot glue. We also made button bugs, paper beetle hand puppets and bug hotels out of pinecones, dandelions, twigs, etc.
 
The kids worked hard on their block colour patterns, letter building with our letter construction kit and building faces our of rocks to show varying emotions.
 
We also had fun jumping on our hop scotch, hula hooping, throwing frisbees, colouring the sidewalk and climbing rocks. The kids ran through water and got sprayed with the hose. What a great morning it was for a little spray down after taking the Bella dog for a run!

This week was all about ladybugs. The kids were lucky enough to have found a few of them on multiple occasions. They sure do love holding them. We have learned so much about ladybugs. Some of the facts we learned are that they have 6 legs just like butterflies do, they do not see very well, they use their antenna to smell, taste and feel, they have a similar lifecycle to butterflies, the eggs they lay look like jellybeans, ladybugs come in a few different colours but all come out of their pupa stage as the colour yellow with no spots yet. Unfortunately the photo of our ladybug information has disappeared. 
 
We explored NoseHill Park a bunch this week. The kids really loved finding ants, roly polys, worms, spiders, beetles, and any type of bug, We discussed what could be living in the holes they saw in the ground, what the bees do with the nectar from the flowers, and why many plants are not around in the winter.
 
The kids were so excited to see if the Tipi we made was still there. Unfortunately, it was apart on the ground, so everyone decided to pick up the pieces and make a new fort. What a great opportunity to be engineers; conceptualizing their fort design, working together and problem-solving, to only name a few reasons why fort building is such a great learning experience. We really explored weight, height, length, and stability.
 
We had a lot of fun doing a baking soda and vinegar science experiment where we put vinegar in a bottle and baking soda in a balloon. After making sure the balloon was tight to the bottle, we turned our balloons upside down to allow the baking soda to drop into the bottle. It was very exciting to watch the balloon blow up because of the chemical reaction.
 
Some other activities we did include; using crayons to build letters that have straight lines, reading (we are really into our Magic Tree House chapter books and reading to each other), making puzzles, building their names, and matching colours using tiny “clippers”, as they call them. 

We learned about the four stages of the butterfly; egg, caterpillar (larva), chrysalis (pupa), butterfly, and what changes happen as the it moves from stage to stage. Some neat things we learned are that butterflies taste through their feet, don’t have mouths and use a proboscis to drink up nectar from flowers. We also learned that the chrysalis is formed from under the caterpillars last layers of skin as it sheds that skin and when in the chrysalis the caterpillar essentially turns to soup before it re-makes itself into a butterfly. There was definitely some fun pretend play being butterflies and using a proboscis to drink up nectar!
 
The kids and I made a couple of butterfly crafts this week. We painted a coffee filter using food colouring and water to make butterfly wings and added a pom pom covered popsicle stick for the body. We also folded an accordion winged butterfly after we painted scrap paper for it.
 
Of course, we also had to go on a few adventures this week! What beautiful weather we have been so lucky to have. We took Bella to a couple different fields, found many dandelions to blow, walked around the neighbourhood to see what we could see (lawn decorations, a variety of birds and flowers), had a picnic and played with hula hoops, sidewalk chalk and balls in the nearest soccer field.
 
We also practiced identifying and building single digit numbers with our letter/number construction kit. The kids did a great job building their numbers so they faced the correct direction too!
 
Over the past few months we have been reading children’s chapter books at rest time. It has been a great experience listening to make pictures in their minds, a practice in comprehension (pausing to ask what just happened, why, and reviewing the big ideas in the previous chapter before reading the day’s chapter), and making predictions, that make sense, about what may happen next. We have read the Tale of Despereaux and watched the movie afterwards. Right now we are onto our second book in the Magic Tree House series.

The kids have been planning what they would like to learn about over the next couple of weeks and this week was all about dinosaurs. We learned the names of many dinosaurs and how to identify herbivores from carnivores. We learned many facts about varying types of dinosaurs; Brachiosaurus’ sleep under water and breath through nostrils on top of their heads, being a long-necked dinosaur was helpful because they could eat leaves on the tops of trees that many other dinosaurs could not reach, and even though Stegosaurus’ are much smaller than T-Rex’s they were very tough and good at defending themselves with the plates on their backs and the spikes on their tails. 
 
Together we painted and put together a paper plate and cardboard tube Stegosaurus, and made Brachiosaurus’ with foam, paper and popsicle sticks.
 
We have been reading many Todd Parr books over the past couple of weeks. Todd Parr books are great at addressing social, emotional and self-esteem topics at the kids’ level. Out of the small collection I have, the kids seem to really enjoy The Okay Book and The Family Book.
 
What a rainy week it has been! But that doesn’t stop us from going out and having a little bit of fun. We went for a few rainy walks and went on a worm rescue mission. We also talked about how worms can breathe air and in the water and how they use rainy days to surface and migrate without drying out

Over the past couple of weeks, the kids have been noticing the increasing numbers of ants, which has sparked an interest in them. So naturally, we spent a week learning about them.
 
We learned about the types of jobs that ants have, what ants eat, what their ant hill may look like on the inside, how strong they are and how they take care of each other when they are hurt.
 
We made our way up NoseHill twice this past week, the second of which the kids were very excited to be allowed to climb up the stairs to their newly discovered ant hill from last week. They took their magnifying glasses with them to get a closer look. We were all very interested to see what was on the underside of the rock that someone had placed on top of the ant hill since we last visited it. Very neat!
 
For a few arts and crafts this week the kids painted egg carton ants and threaded pipe cleaners through for legs, painted tape resist ant hills and glued black beans to represent the ants within the tunnels of the ant hill, and made paper ant puppets by piecing together circles they cut.
 
We learned about the final letter of the alphabet this week! And practiced building letters using our magnetic pieces. We have building our names frequently with tiny wooden letters; some are working on their last names by choice!
 
We played a game where you roll the dice, read the number and put on the correct amount of beads, as well as took the dog for walks, played with dinosaurs in the park, and explored nature areas.

Happy Mother’s Day and Happy Cinco de Mayo!
 
Getting ready for Mother’s Day was enjoyable. The kids did an amazing job keeping it a surprise for a few days! I hope you are having a wonderful day with your little ones.
 
We had so much fun celebrating Cinco de Mayo! The kids made huge tissue paper flowers to put in their hair and wore them almost every day this week! They helped me make up tacos for lunch. Those were a hit! For a little added science, we made maracas using varying sizes of beans/seeds to see how their sizes and quantities changed the sound the maracas made.
 
Our letters this week were X and Y. We also spent some time on rhyming words as some of our letter’s words rhymed.

We went on a nature scavenger hunt; finding ant hills, beetles, spiders, Crocus’ and other types of plants.
 
We also baked muffins this week, played number BINGO and found objects that matched a variety of shapes.