Week 14 - Review

It has been a short week but one that was filled with information about Antarctica! We learned that Antarctica is the coldest continent and that the only plant that grows is moss for a short time. It is home to penguins, seals, whales, skuas, petrels, albatross, krill, zoo plankton and some people who do research projects for a short time. The song we learned was to the tune of "O Christmas Tree" and it goes like this...
Antarctica, Antarctica, it is the coldest continent
Antarctica, Antarctica, it is the coldest continent
There are no trees or people there
There are no homes or polar bears
Antarctica, Antartica, is home to seals and penguins.

The children loved learning about the animals of Antarctica. They learned and understand the meaning of predator, carnivore, herbivore, omnivore, vertebrate, invertebrate, rookery, creche.  We also did some work separating animals by vertebrate type: mammals, fish, reptile, bird, amphibian, as well as land and water animals.

The children were able to make penguins from paper and then also did some drawings of them. One girl (age  5) made her own book and spelled out each word & sentence independently, words like chinstrap penguin, girl, saving, whale. What impressed me most was listening to her as she worked along. As she spelled each word she made each sound...when she got to the word whale, she reminded herself, "remember that whale has the silent h after the w and a silent e at the end."  Prior to her deciding to do this work I read them a book about whales. She commented that the word didn't look like it should say whales. I explained that the h was silent like in the words "white", "when", and that the "e" was silent, making the "a" say it's own name. She responded with "okay" and asked that I continue reading. Yet, when left to complete a book of her own, she remembered this small detail through a conversation, not by repeating many pages in a grammar or language arts "rule book".

We also were able to do some measuring using the red rods. The Emperor penguin can grow to be 1.2 m tall   (which is taller than most of the children) where the Little Blue Fairy penguin and the Rockhopper penguin grow to be just 30 cm. The widest wingspan ever recorded of the albatross was 3.6 m which was from the couch to the fireplace - a very long distance indeed!

UNO is beginning to be a real favourite game for the group. It is great to see their focus increase to play a full game, encouraging one another and following rules, taking turns, and trying to lay those "tricky" cards like miss a turn, or change direction!

A reminder that the school will be closed now and re-open on Monday, December 17th. The children in the 3-day/week program will be attending 5 days that week.