News for June 17

News for June 17

The class is very excited about our Painted Lady butterfly project. This week the first butterfly came out of it's chrysalis. At the end of the week there were 9 butterflies in our butterfly house. We put orange Gatorade in the house because the butterflies think it is nectar. We saw that the wings have beautiful patterns on them. The top side has bright colours like orange, white and black and the underside has softer colours like brown and beige. The chrysalis was as thin as tissue paper! We learned that the butterfly's tongue is long and hollow like a straw. It curls it up into a spiral when it is not using it. We butterflies' tongues when we watched them. We also noticed that we know when the butterfly is going to come out of the chrysalis, because the outside turns clear and we can see the pattern of the wings inside! All the students got to drink some Gatorade so that they could pretend they were butterflies and know what the "nectar" tasted like.

We read books about butterflies this week and one was a book that showed the patterns of the scales of the butterflies wings that looked like letters of the alphabet! As always, more information about the books we read in class can be found at our sister blog at:

http://planet5books.blogspot.com/

The class learned the poem "My Butterfly" this week. They also learned the American Sign Language signs to go along with the words in the poem. The words to this poem were sent home with your child on Friday.

The students worked hard to make gifts for Father's Day. They decorated frames and wrote words and drew pictures to go inside. The children also made butterflies out of paper and pipe cleaners to decorate the presents.

In math, the students are reviewing counting and number sense. We practised our skip counting and learned how to count by 5's.

The students are still fascinated by the insects in our playground. They are getting very good at applying their knowledge of insects to the new ones they see in the playground. One of their favourite activities is to watch the ants by the wood pieces surrounding the play equipment. We also have seen some bees and the children remember seeing honeycomb last week and having a chance to try eating some of the honey inside the hexagon-shaped honeycomb. Even bees can do math as they create hexagons!

The students are enjoying the nice weather as we do our daily physical activity time outside. One new activity we started this week was blowing bubbles. "It's like we are in a big bubble bath!" and "These look like rainbow bubbles!" were some of the observations of the children.