Clay Spiders

Making clay spiders takes lots of concentration!

Spiders at Kindy

It all started when Phoebe brought in a picture of a spider that she had drawn at home. Then she brought in her Spider book AARGH!

Then other children started drawing spiders, bringing in spider books and it took off!

Spiders....here we come!

We got out our black spiders and put them on the table to do observational drawings.

We started learning all sorts of interesting things about spiders as well from the books that we collected.

Our Korowai

This is our new Korowai (cloak) that we have made to greet and farewell staff, student teachers and children going to school.

To find out about korowai a small group of children went to the Auckland museum to see what was on display.

We gave the children a camera each and they took the photos . It was the first time we had been on a trip without adults taking photos to record the event!

Their photos were great.

We used our kindy korowai for the first time when Jaime and Pea joined us as student teachers on practicum.

Millie wore the cloak and shook their hands and Eashaan greeted them and introduced the song we wanted to sing to them.

Jaime and Pea said they felt very welcomed so we knew it had been a good thing to develop!

Measuring each other!

We've been looking at different sizes of things at Kindy this week, like the pictures of our sunflowers and labelling them with words to describe their size.

At mat time one day we played a new game, measuring yourselves!!

Lorraine called you up and you all had to stand in a row while the children on the mat helped to sort you out into the shortest to the tallest!

After that we placed your magnetic face by the right sized sunflower!

You can see the sunflowers and your faces on the magnetic board behind!

Flowers from our garden

Our garden has grown some very pretty asters.

Ashton helped pick some of them for us to have in the kindy.

Sasha, Eli and Olivia spent a lot of time and care arranging the flowers for the tables.

Pretty tricky getting those stems into the narrow vases.

Sharing the flowers between three vases took some negotiation too!

Now...where shall I put this vase!

They look good on the sign in table, Sasha.

Many thanks!

Eating yummy things from our garden.

Look, Laith has spotted some juicy, ripe red tomatoes!

Ishwari has collected those yummy tomatoes, along with some long green beans.

Time to try our home grown veggies at morning tea time!

Fraser, you liked them so much that you came back for seconds!

Eashaan, you were very keen to have a try too...

...you told me they were "Yummy".

I'm not sure if I believe you!

Sunflowers in our garden

Look how lush our garden is now!

Can you see the butterfly on Toyah's hand?

We cut off three of our sunflower heads so that we could really study the interesting seed patterns.

We got out the magnifying glasses and some pencils and paper to draw what we could see.

Juliette's butterfly landed on our remaining sunflower!

Can you see the bumble bee in the middle?