Have you ever wondered how such heavy objects such as boats or jet skis can float in the water? How no water gets inside?
Or how people can sit inside a boat and it not be too heavy?

Well, the Laduybugs spent the morning exploring this concept by using materials such as popsicle sticks and aluminum foil to create boats that would be able to float in water!

Each child was given as many popsicle sticks as they wanted, and a few pieces of aluminum foil to start and very quickly they all started to brainstorm what made a boat strong enough and safe enough to be in the water.

"I need glue to put the sticks together to make a floor for my boat"

"I'm putting these things on the side like bumpers to keep the water out"

"Look, my boat has ears like Shrek"

"I'm going to make this nice and strong here so it doesn't break"

"I'm going to make mine into a jet ski!"

 Once the boats and jet skis were ready to go, we moved on to the fun part... the children got to put their boat to the test by adding rocks inside to see if it was strong enough to stay afloat!

We started with smaller, lighter weighted rocks and slowly added more and more to see how far we could push it. By the end, some children had their whole pile of rocks safely inside without the boat sinking!

​"This rock is nice and light, so it will float"

"I think it will sink because that rock is SOOOO heavy"

"Let's see if this boat works, I put stuff under this one to make a floor"

"Isn't that cool? I used up ALL my rocks and it still floats"

 As we tested the boats in the water, we discussed what worked and what didn't work with some of the designs and brainstormed what we thought made a good boat and from our experiment we came up with the following:

1. Boats work better when they have a strong structure for the floor,
it helps keep the heavy objects secure

2. Boats need to have high enough sides so that water doesn't
pour over into the boat causing it to flood

3. Absolutely NO holes will be able to be along the bottom of the
boat near the water, or else it fills with water and sinks

4. With a good structure, boats can hold a lot of weight.
Some of the boats we tested had SO many rocks on it and it didn't.

What a great activity to kick off the summer season...
Who else is ready to test this theory on a real boat this summer? We sure are!

- Amberly 

 
It all started when one child pointed to a box labeled, “Ant Works, a space-age habitat for ants” that was stored in one of our cupboards. He asked if we could bring it outside and search for ants and so we did!  

Once we went outside, everyone wanted to join in! The Ladybugs worked together as they searched for the ants, safely captured them and monitored their health.
 
One child noticed that one of the ants in our enclosure had a broken leg...

He exclaimed, “We need to rescue it!”. Any injured ants were immediately released back into the wild.

 
Once the grasshoppers, caterpillars and ladybugs start populating the school yard, I know that these Kinders are going to be in a buggy paradise!  
 
- Vita

During both of these experiences, I saw SO MUCH teamwork and communication among the scientists! I wonder what our scientists will investigate in June! 

- Vita 

The Kinders really enjoy mixing up paints to create new shades of their favorite colors. To expand on this interest I set up a scientific approach to mixing up the rainbow. Each scientist was set up with a pallet of colored water, eye droppers, fizzing color tablets, a petri dish, and some gel crystals. The task was to exercise fine motor skills by using the tiny items to mix, move, and create new hues.

Then, I added a few drops of Baby Oil to an empty spot in the color pallet - the results fascinated the Kinders! Oil doesn't like to mix with anything!

And now, onto photos of our March inservice, where we celebrated color for the Indian holiday Holi. Jasbir and I used bright, bold colorful tissue paper to decorate the Kinder room, and we allowed the Kinders to use their feet & bodies to paint on a huge piece of paper right in the middle of our room! 

For clean up each child had a tub of warm, soapy water. Cleaning up was just as much fun as making the paint mess!

On another day, we tried "perspective painting". With an item in the centre of the table, the Kinders gathered around to paint what they saw, then compared their paintings with their friends. This was an excellent exercise in understanding - we talked about how we may see or feel things differently while experiencing the same situation. We also got some really, really great masterpieces out of it!

Our I Spy books have become very popular in Kindercare, and we've been having a lot of fun with them, reading almost daily. In fact, we read them so much that they were no longer a challenge and we decided to create our very own I Spy book!

With a variety of items found around the Kinder Room, we laid out large pieces of paper and carefully arranged things to make pictures just like the ones in our books.

We printed out the pictures and put them in our very own binder, each page asking the reader to find three specific items in their I Spy puzzle. Our Kinders are very proud of this project and our book sits on a shelf in our library, available to everyone!

We've also been exploring the beauty of bird feathers, after one child noticed some peacock feathers we had. I brought in a few from my own collection, and we used magnifying glasses to inspect each one closely.

Once we had fully inspected each feather, the children chose paint colors that matched the colors they noticed and began to create not only their versions of the feathers, but also the birds they came from. Some went on to paint flowers and nature scenes, others kept with the theme and painted bird after bird! 

I offered finger painting again on a different day, but this time with just drops of color on one large paper. White, green, blue and purple hues with a variety of "tools" created lovely underwater imagery!

Finger painting is an excellent way to explore sensory, calm your mind, and enjoy a mess. Give it a try next time you find yourself needing a break from your usual routine; You may be surprised at how good it feels to dip your whole arm in paint! 

Wow - what a wild few weeks our weather has given us! Piles of snow, crazy cold temperatures, a few blizzards and even some rain have given the Kinders a lot of opportunity to experience and explore all our Manitoba winters have to offer.

One of the first things we did after the first big snowfall was gear up and venture out into the forest to fill a few bird feeders we had found the week before.

It was quite a challenge, trekking through the super deep snow! But with a bag of bird seed on a sled and a mission, the Ladybugs managed to fill up all four empty bid feeders before collapsing into a snowbank, exhausted.

For the most recent blizzard, we decided to go out right in the middle of the storm and have a "color parade". The Caterpillars used ribbons tied to sticks to create splashes of color in the very grey afternoon!

On the days where we spent more time inside, we became scientists! We brought the snow indoors and made snow volcanoes, we explored the wonders of shaving cream with rainbow water, and we learned a little math with Dinosaur Monopoly & Connect Four. 

Thank you to all the parents for giving the thumbs up to our in-service trip to Tomlinson Park for some sledding fun! The weather was perfect, the hill was snowy, and the everyone had a great time!

This was Jasbir's first time sledding, and Sara is just a big kid - enjoy these candid videos of the staff joining in on the fun!

​Everyone had snow much fun! The Kindercare kids and staff alike can't wait for future trips down the hill as our wonderful winter weather settles in.

​Earlier in the week we brought art outside with colorful ice shapes. We made cakes, decorated giant snowballs, and created gem clustered boulders!

​On another day we brought out colorful water to paint the big white snowy canvas outside....

Stay tuned for more exciting winter activities from the Kindercare Kids!

Diwali is the most famous Indian celebration. This year is took place from November 1st - 5th. The main focus of this holiday is the day of Pooja, a day of blessings for good health and prosperity.

Educator Jasbir made rangoli in the entryway of our Kinder room, and hung lights up all around.

Rangoli are designs made with colored sand at the entryway of each home to offer warm welcomes. Different designs represent different traditional values such as peace and purity.

The whole school participated in the celebration. Some staff made a rangoli at the entrance to the school, which the Kinders really enjoyed.

The children got into festivities by making posters, watching Youtube stories that explained Diwali, and we read the story of Binny's Diwali.

Then, the children got the opportunity to try a little rangoli themselves!

We are very fortunate to have such a diverse group of friends here at John de Graff and Dawn & Dusk to teach us about holidays and celebrations. We like to be inclusive and we like to embrace one another's differences and learn about other cultures! By understanding our unique qualities we can enjoy and appreciate each other that much more!

Feel free to let Kindercare know of any celebrations your family participates in so we can learn more about you, too!

"Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!" is a quote from Miss Frizzle from the popular children's show, the Magic School Bus, but it's also one of our mottos here in Kindercare.

So in the spirit of that motto, I gave the children a challenge; to carve a ghost out of a bar of soap using nothing but popsicle sticks and warm water.
​

This proved to be a challenge, as the bars of soap weren't quite soft enough to carve. So, to add a bit of Halloween themed creepiness we colored our water with red food coloring and gave the kids liquid syringes. Our activity went from carving ghosts into gooey soap dissections.

​Besides having uninhabited "messy" play, this particular activity helped the children work their fine motor skills, sharpened their focus, and gave them the opportunity to make as big a mess as possible while still being "clean"! And that's why we called this activity "good clean fun"!

For our most recent inservice last week the Kindercare team planned a day full of sensory based activities.

We began the day with Sounds Jars. We had ten tin cans with different items inside. The idea was to shake the cans, try to see if we could guess what was inside, then see if we could find the can with the matching sound. The kids had to listen very closely, as some cans sounded almost exactly the same. After they had guessed their matching sound jars, they got to open up the lids and peek inside to see if they had matched correctly!

Next we had scent jars. Jasbir provided us with 10 different spices and lentils from India for us to touch and smell. Once each jar had been passed around we handed out mortar & pestles, for the kids to mix and mash.

Earlier in the week, we had gone to Superstore to pick out a few pumpkins.....

We gutted the pumpkins and played with the "guts", enjoying the slimy feel and the fresh smells. The kids were given a variety of things to use, but our hands were the preferred method to hollow out our perfectly picked pumpkins.

We were already messy, so the next logical move was to just make more mess! Each child was given a tray with some dirt and a cup of water. It wasn't long before our Monster Mashers were adding pumpkin guts and Indian spices to the marvelous muck!

Throughout the day we spoke often about what we were smelling, what we were seeing, what things felt like, and what kind of sounds we were hearing. We identified our senses that were in effect with each activity, and while the kids thought we were just having a day of messy fun the Dawn and Dusk educators knew that to play is to learn, and to learn is to play - and that's just what happened on sensory day!