Skip to main content

Learning In and Out of the Classroom

Wednesday class:

Children spent a lot of time on fine motor development today as they poured, scooped, and squeezed. These simple activities help children to develop their fine motor and concentration skills. These activities strengthen their muscles, increase precision, support hand-eye coordination and concentration.



 

Friday class:

We had a lot of fun on our first visit to the Richmond Food Bank. We feel very fortunate that we had the opportunity to volunteer our services. We feel it is important for our children to learn how to care for others in their community and lend a helping hand when they are able.

We began with a tour of the facility, led by the Volunteer Coordinator, Keith Yee. We looked at the groceries, household products, containers, other volunteers, organization procedures and the forklift. We all went into the huge refrigerator- very exciting indeed! We then divided into 3 groups. Two groups counted out packages of diapers and the other group assembled snack bags for children. The children worked well overall- focused for about 15-20 minutes straight! We are proud of them.

When asked what they liked best about the food bank the following comments were made:

Zev: I like the food
Niko:Sorting diapers
Wayne: Liked making snack bags
Nicolas: Sorting diapers but they were yucky
Cole: Filling bags and having muffins
Colin: Sorting diapers. Clean ones ( btw, they were ALL clean of course!)
Alexa: Sorting diapers and counting
Sidney: When I was in the fridge I was so cold, freezing cold
Chloe: When I carried the apple juice, the applesauce and the 2 granola bars ( these were the components for the snack bags)
Emily: Seeing the fridge
Kayla: Sorting diapers
Cash: Counting diapers and putting them into a bag
Brooke: I like going in the refrigerator

It was such a beautiful day so we went to Terra Nova  for lunch, gardening, and storytelling. After lunch, we picked our drying beans. These will be dried on their stalks, the beans will be threshed and then we will use them in a cooking project. Here are some of our beans.



 We used our spades and turned the soil....



Digging with our superhero gloves on (yes, again!)

Then into the field for storytelling....a busy and productive Friday!

Emily

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mosaic Garden Stones

Today our children had an amazing opportunity to work with Glen Anderson, a local artist specializing in mosaics. You can see his work at http://www.mosaicplanet.net . I met Glen last year at Urban Weavers Studio in Strathcona. I asked him many, many questions about mosaics, all of which he patiently answered with expertise. I was gearing up for an art project in our preschool class so I really wanted to get any pointers I could from him. The plan was to have our students make mosaic tiles to place along our fence at the garden plot at Terra Nova Farm. They worked out very well, thanks to Glen's great advice and it was a beautiful moment when child and parent hung the stones at the farm on our last day of school. It was a moment of great pride for all of us. The garden that they cared for with their own hands- tended to its needs in sunshine and in rain. They will always remain part of that space, that land and their stone will remind them of this connection. Even though they turne...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Love for Cabbage

Another day of working with cabbage-our prized cabbage that I babied throughout the summer. The cabbage that I saved from the demise of cabbage worms, watered, and surrounded with copper to scare away slugs. So, yes, babied. After all that care and love I was hoping the children would enjoy working with this gorgeous vegetable and like the taste of it. The coleslaw was a hit last week but would cooked cabbage get the same positive response? We assembled our ingredients for cabbage rolls and showed all the children. They smelled all the spices that were in the recipe and many of them loved the smell of the fresh garlic! They took great pride in recognizing onion, salt, pepper, tomato sauce and ground beef. I wanted to introduce them to another herb so we passed around marjoram, which many agreed smelled sweet. We pre-cooked the meat just so the children could work with the food without any cause for concern. The smell of the onions and meat simmering sparked the interest of many ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Volunteering at Richmond Food Bank

Today was our last day volunteering at the Richmond Food Bank. I am so grateful we had this opportunity– it has been an extraordinary experience for all of us. I, myself, have been very lucky to work in a community where I have seen dedicated volunteers working countless hours for people and projects they believe in. In my own community centre, the staff devote extra hours for many events, all to help strengthen our community. From these experiences grew a desire within me to try to share this with our children. How can we make them generous with their time and energy for the good of others? How can we teach them to be giving people– people that think of others? Are they too young for these concepts? In my need to answer these questions, I sought to find a volunteer opportunity for them. I thought about many different ideas but the food bank always came out ahead. I was lucky enough to come across an open-minded and risk-taking individual– let's face it, preschoolers gett...
Post a Comment
Read more