Board Game Day!

Today was a super fun day in kindergarten!  We invited parents to bring in one or two board games that they like to play at home with their family.  There were four parent volunteers so we were able to play each board game for about 20 minutes.  All the parents did a fantastic job of explaining the rules and working with the small groups.  Everyone had such a great time taking turns, following the rules and celebrating when their friends won.

The Morning Games

Pete's Buttons

Trouble

Sorry

Curious George Discovery Beach Game

The Afternoon Games

Kerplunk

Operation

5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed 

Candy Land

The Lady Bug Game

In keeping with the math theme of the day, we made a math snack. We used strawberries, grapes, apples, marshmallows and fruit gummies to make a pattern kabob. They were super yummy!

To end the day, we listened to stories read by the wonderful volunteers.  It was a great day!  Thank you to everyone who came to help!

How to Mix Colours

We have learned so much about colour and colour mixing. To show our learning, everyone wrote their own colour mixing book using the Book Creator app.

As a class, we brainstormed all the different ways that we experimented with when mixing the primary colours. (eye droppers, q-tips, finger painting, spray bottles, etc) Then we practised writing step by step instructions as a class before we wrote our very own plans.

After all the step by step instructions were written, we took pictures and then wrote down the steps in book creator. Everyone was really excited that they wrote they own book!

The Morning Class

The Afternoon Class

Automatic Art

We are so lucky to have our student teacher, Miss B with us!  She is very creative and shared her love of art with us with two fun and interesting art activities.  The first automatic art activity was a group art job.  She told us that some artists draw just from their brain.  They close their eyes and let their brain and hands do the work. She played a variety of different pieces of music and we had to close our eyes and draw just by listening to the music.  At first, many of us wanted to draw pictures, but then we listened a little harder and we drew lots of different lines and shapes.  After we listened to a few pieces and drew all over a huge mural paper, we changed spots.  We had to look at our friends art and see if we could find different shapes and pictures within their art. It was amazing to see all the creative minds at work!

Miss B.  demonstrating how to draw from your brain

The second automatic art activity was called Blot Painting.  Each student got to drip paint onto a white sheet of card stock.  Then they folded the paper in half and pressed the paint down. When the paper was opened, the shapes and colours were super interesting. Miss B helped us make our own art book of what we think our Blot paintings look like.

The Morning Class

The Afternoon Class

Stop Motion Videos

Another fun and creative way that the kindergartens have been experimenting with colour mixing is with the Stop Motion App.  It is a free app to download, and it is very easy to use.

To get our imaginations going, we watched a few different stop motion videos and our interests were peaked.  Everyone thought it was so cool how the play dough moved, but we couldn't see anyone's hand do the moving.  Some ideas we had of how this happened was that is was "magic" or that the pieces were "magnetic," an invisible hand, or done by a computer.  

Next we set up an iPad and a backdrop.  As a class we practiced moving the play dough pieces a little at a time.  This was a little tricky at first, but everyone got the hang of it.  Then we went to work snapping pictures of every little move.  

Before we made our own videos, we talked about the importance of making a plan. Because we were working with other people, not everyone could do what they wanted. We had to talk to our friends and come up with ideas what would make everyone happy.  

Everyone did a great job working together as a team.  After about 25 minutes, all the pictures were taken and each group had their very own colour mixing stop motion video.

We hope you like watching them as much as we had making them,

The Morning Class 

Mikey, Lucas, Griffin

Zeida, Zti, Lilia

Chantel and Jesse

Kaileen and Mackenzie

The Afternoon Class

Mattejas, Atley, Ethan, Xander

William, Kylie, Seth, Julie

Rebecca, Teagan, Cohen

Robert, Addison, Wyatt, Jordyn

Pezzettino

One of our favourite books that we have read during our colour study is called Pezzettino by Leo Lionni.  Pezzettino, which means "little piece" in Italian is sure that he is the missing piece from somebody else. He tries to find the one that he belongs to, but no one is missing a piece. In the end, he learns that he belongs to no one but himself.

We really enjoyed the vibrant, mosaic style pictures and thought we should make some of our own.

Finger painting with the primary colours to make the colours from the story.

More finger painting.

We cut up our finger painted paper into little pieces so we could create our own pictures.

More creating with little pieces.

After we created our pictures out of little pieces, we wrote a story describing what makes them special and unique.  The criteria for this piece of writing was that they had to tell what kind of creation they had made.  (I am the ____ one. )  They also had to share two or more supporting ideas of what their creation can do.  The results are amazing!

The Morning Class

The Afternoon Class

Experimenting with Colour Mixing

Continuing on with our colour inquiry, we were introduced to the paintings of Piet Mondrian.  We noticed that the squares and rectangles he painted were red, yellow and blue which are the three primary colours. To help us remember these colours, we created our own primary colour art inspired by Mondrian's abstract style.

First, we cut out squares and rectangles in the primary colours and glued them to a white paper making sure to leave lots of room between the shapes.  Then we added a continuous line of black paint (we called it a road) around all the squares.

Another artist we looked at was Wassily Kandinsky.  We studied his painting "Colour Study. Squares with Concentric Circles." 

Our job was to paint our own version of this painting. The only problem was that we only had the three primary colours to work with. We set to work and discovered that when we mixed the colours together we made new colours.

**Make sure to look at our bulletin boards outside the kindergarten room to see the finished pieces.**

After we discovered that we could make new colours by mixing the primary colours together, we began to explore in a variety of ways.

First, we used q-tips to mix two primary colours together.  Our mixing produced green, purple and orange which we know are the secondary colours.

Then we used spray bottles filled with the primary colours and sprayed the water into buckets.  We were so excited every time we made a secondary colour.  

Miss B. showed us the magic milk experiment. She poured some milk into a shallow dish and added some red, blue and yellow food colouring.  Then she added a drop of dish soap.  As soon as the dish soap hit the milk, the food colouring began to swirl and mix together which created the secondary colours. 

Another way we made the secondary colours was by mixing up two pieces of play dough. After a lot of squishing we were so excited to see a secondary colour begin to form. We loved how bright the colours turned out.

We also tried mixing colours with shaving cream.  We squirted a dollop of shaving cream and a few drops of food colouring into a ziploc bag. Then we squished the baggies in our hands to mix it up.  What we found when we opened up the baggies was that the colours were very light.  We learned that white make colours lighter.