Adventures in Italy-Part 1

Our adventure began on Saturday afternoon when we flew out of Winnipeg...three planes, two busses, two trains and a taxi later, we finally arrived in Reggi Emilia, Italy.

We were so excited to get here, and couldn't wait to go explore this beautiful city. We were amazed at the beautiful architecture and the fabulous weather!

On Monday we were introduced to the Loris Malaguzzi centre where we are doing most of our learning. We are meeting many amazing educators from all over Canada. 

 

Over the past two days we have visited many different learning centres. We have participated in rich dialogues with the teachers at these early learning centres. We are taking many notes and are doing our best to sketch all the different inspiring learning environments. (To respect the rights of the children, we have been asked not to take pictures)

In the evenings we have been enjoying exploring the city and all of it's shops, people, and tasty treats! 

This is a blog post from Ms. Dowd and Mrs. Lowe (Stevenson School)

 

A Busy, Busy Week...

With Mother's Day coming up, we wanted to make a special gift for our mom's to show them how much we love them  We each made a bouquet of flowers out of coffee filters and then painted our hands and printed them on the side of the pot.  We also wrote special letters to our Mom's telling them why we love them so much!

All week we had lots and lots of fun dressing up for spirit week and earning spirit bucks.  Thank you so much to our fantastic parent council for putting on such a great week.  Our favourite part was playing all the milk inspired games....and earning spirit bucks. 

We ended the week on a little bit of a sad note.  Our beloved Mrs. L is starting a new job, and will not  be at Linwood anymore.  To show her how much we love her, all the students in the school signed their name on a tote bag.  This way she will always remember us.  We also had a surprise party for her and invited Mrs. Stevenson's class and Mrs. Chumola's class.  We are all really going to miss her.

Dino Day

Dino Day has become a Linwood tradition! The kindergartens practise dinosaurs songs and poems all month so they can put on a show for their families. After they finished performing, they gave their families a tour of the room and shared all the learning that has taken place over the month.

Thank you to everyone who came to show your support to the students and share in their learning.

The Morning Class

The Afternoon Class

As we were learning about dinosaurs, we came across Story Bots dinosaur videos.  The videos are fun, informative and very catchy.  We voted on our favourites, and with a little green screen magic, we were in the videos.

The Morning Class

The Afternoon Class

A Dinosaur a Day

We are so curious about dinosaurs!  Each day this week we learned about a different dinosaur. First we read a non-fiction book, then watched a few video clips.  As a class we made a web to record all the new information we learned.  We are going to us all the facts we learned to write our own non-fiction dinosaur book next week.

On Monday we learned about the Tyrannosaurus Rex.  We learned that T-Rex walked on two feet and had a hug foot with 3 toes.  We measured our own kindergarten sized feet against a T-Rex footprint. 

Then we learned that T-Rex has up to 60 sharp teeth.  We measured the size of his mouth and counted the teeth.  We were so amazed how big a T-Rex mouth is.  A whole kindergarten class can fit inside.

On Tuesday we learned about the Stegosaurus.  First we went into the hallway to measure out how long a Stegosaurus would be. (We did this will all the dinosaurs)  Then we used our own bodies to see how many kids long that would be.  

On Wednesday it was all about Triceratops.  Everyone drew a Triceratops head with a decorated frill. Then we made three horns.  It was tricky making the horns, but all the Triceratops turned out fantastic.

Then on Thursday we were so excited to learn about the Apatosaurus.  Some scientist believe that the Apatosaurus would swallow stones to help digest the plants they ate. To show how this theory worked, half of us put just lettuce leaves into a bag, and the other half of us added rocks to our bags of lettuce.  Then we kneaded the bags with our hands.  When were compared the two sets of bags, we were amazed how much the rocks helped "digest" the lettuce leaves.

On Friday, we finished up with the Velociraptor. Because the Velociraptor is know as a "speedy thief," it was only fitting to have our own Raptor races!  

 

We learned that Velociraptors of feathers.

We also got to experience how tall each dinosaurs was.  First, we went outside and used helium filled balloons to show the height of each dinosaur.  The wind made it a little difficult, but we were still amazed at their size.  Then we let the balloons up in our classroom, the hallway and even the gym. Even though Linwood has very high ceilings, almost all the dinosaurs would bump their heads!

Our Pet Dinosaurs

We thought it would be fun if we had our very own dinosaur as a pet. With a little green screen magic, we were able to make that wish come true. We also wrote about our dinosaurs and gave them a name.  We worked very hard on our writing!  We hope you enjoy our stories.

 The Morning Class

The Afternoon Class

Dinosaur Dig

We are very excited to learn about Dinosaurs!  To start off our inquiry, we became Kindergarten Paleontologists.  We watched a few short video clips, and read some books to get us started.  Then each of us dressed up like we were going out into the field to find real dinosaur bones.  Everyone was very excited to explore with all the tools.  

We couldn't wait to get our hands dirty and to find some dinosaur fossils.  Some of the tools we used were brushes, magnify glasses, flashlights, tape measures, shovels, pick axe(rake), safety goggles and of course our hands.

Trying to find our found fossils in a dinosaur book.

We even made our own dig site at the block centre