Happy Monday everyone, we hope you have had a wonderful weekends with your families. The children have loved sharing news about what you have all been up to this weekend.

This week it is book week, it was great to see a few of our friends dressed up today as some of their favourite book characters a long with some children bringing in books to share with us. We are looking forward to seeing your book week characters over the week. Today at our group time we have been listening to Beauty and the Beast and Pumpkins, pumpkins everywhere. This afternoon we have one more story to read about Thomas the tank engine.  If your children do not have costumes, we would still love for them to bring in their favourite books to share with us. During the week we will be incorporating lots of reading both group reading, quiet reading and one on one reading with Miss Emma.

This week we are continuing on with our inquiry into caterpillars and Butterflies. At group time this morning before watching an informative video about butterflies, the children had the opportunity to share some questions that they have about Butterflies and Caterpillars. This was a great opportunity for Miss Emma to talk about and explain what a question is, as the children when asked were all really excited to share information that they already knew, rather than questions. This will be a skill that we will continue to explore and Miss Emma will support the children with this by providing them lots of examples of what a question is. Jacob had a great question for us which was What do they eat?  and Jaxon asked “Do they go to sleep?”  Today and tomorrow we will be researching to find the answer to these questions as we watch our video, read books and research on the internet. At the conclusion of the video the children had the opportunity if they wished to share any information that they had found out. Today just three friends wanted to share their information, Jaxon “When they break out of the cocoon, they turn into Butterfly.” Layla “Making sure they don’t fall off the flower by gluing their feet.”,  and Emily “The Caterpillars go into the shell, they come out as a Butterfly.” Well done everyone.

Now it was time to engage in our morning activities both planned by Miss Emma and child initiated activities. We continued on with our Butterfly and Caterpillar theme. Today the children had the opportunity to revisit an activity we did on Friday which was making the very hungry caterpillar sitting on a leaf, using one that Miss Emma had made for us to use as a guide and inspiration. This experience was a great opportunity for the children to persist with difficulty, problem solve, use their coordination and strengthen their fine motor skills as they manipulated the paper into shape, and used the glue to stick it all together.

As the children have been loving drawing, today Miss Emma set up a drawing activity where the children had pictures of lots of different Butterflies that they could use for inspiration. As the children drew their pictures we talked about the different Butterflies we could see, the similarities, the differences,the different colours and patterns of the Butterflies and whether we had seen any of the butterflies before.  Tomorrow the children will have the opportunity to make butterflies using paper plates. Through this experience they will be able to freely express their creativity, use butterfly pictures for inspiration, and further strengthen their fine motor skills through drawing, painting, and cutting.

Child initiated play that was occurring this morning included Layla, Jaxon and Emily engaging in family play, there was some wonderful negotiations as they worked out who was going to play each roles , the children used the peg boards to create patterns, and  the children were making some wonderful music with the musical instruments this morning creating wonderful sound and rhythm.

This afternoon the children are going to be working on some very special projects for special people in their lives, drawing, geoboards, peg boards, puzzles and lots of outdoor play.