Spare Moments: youtube

Showing posts with label youtube. Show all posts

Friday, February 21, 2014

Winter Art

Between stealing moments of watching the Olympic games in Russia we have actually been doing some work. :) I have tried to tie in the Social Studies with this very exciting period for sports enthusiasts. Definitely and effortlessly we are getting the citizenship and pride of your country covered.

Getting to see the symbols and anthem in action has also been a great experience. Though not normally involved, I do like to see how Canada does on the world stage. Very well, I would say!!

We are doing a mini-unit on Russia and I found this great art project on pinterest. We have been seeing these giant Matryoshkas (How Russian!) on the slopes in Russia.
After painting a background, we traced, drew and brightly coloured the shapes; cut them out and pasted them to the background. The kids really enjoyed drawing the designs and colouring them... and who's to say that a Matryoshka can't have horns?!

Now for a taste of traditional Russian Music and costume, here's some lively music...

I found this video along with other activities at this site. Activity Village

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Australia Theme

School has been busy as ever. I am looking forward to a bit of a break after Valentine's Day. We have just finished off a social studies unit on Australia. What a great country to study! The uniqueness of it adds to the interest. Being a continent, island, and country in itself was a great lesson to my students. They have been introduced to these concepts and to all the facts that make for a very interesting study!

When putting together a unit study my first stop is always the school library. Here are some of the books I found and used.

Story books

Books by Mem Fox -- One of my favourite authors and she's from Australia.

Early chapter books and step-by-step drawing books.

Non-fiction books.

and of course we made a book -- A is for Australia, an acrostic poem.

Uluru Rock came in central on this page of amazing animals by one of my first graders.

Paintings of the Coral Reef.

We started with finger-painting a blue background. Then we added yellow paint to the top and red to the bottom and mixed them with the blue to make green and purple for the hues of the sea. The students used their thumb print for the school of fish and added sea plants in yellow. This was a nice activity that was successful for all students.

Aborigine Dot Art

The Australian animal was drawn on black paper, cut out, and then decorated with different sized dots in metallic tempera paints. We also made boomerangs, but some things make it home faster than others. I never got a picture.

Animal Non-fiction stories.

You-tube is a great source of information.

Great Barrier Reef Video -- my students just love this one. We are watching it a little at a time as we find a few minutes.

My students' all time favourite song!

...and my favourite Australian collection!

If you will be studying Australia, here is a link to my pinterest board.

My Australia Pinterest Board

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Monarch Butterflies

We started school three days ago. I have another great group of kids this year. Very interesting I might add too -- 7 kindergarteners!

That is a first for me as normally I get small numbers of beginners; too small for serious kiddie stuff. Most of the time they just get to tag along with my other group work doing modified versions.

I started my grades 1-3s on guided reading. One of the books I did with a group this afternoon was on butterflies including their life-cycles. I had to share my experience of collecting caterpillars this summer in South Dakota with my nieces and actually watching the metamorphic cycle. When I got out my camera card, I realized the earlier photos were at home.

So here goes; I will organize them so that tomorrow I can just share this post with them.

Monarch egg

We got a few milkweed leaves with eggs on them. We only kept them around long enough to find one teeny tiny caterpillar a few mm long. We then got rid of the eggs as we had larger caterpillars to observe.

We brought home two caterpillars, one was larger then the other and obviously almost ready for the chrysalis stage. We were surprised how quickly the smaller one grew. It took about a week for the first to change into the final stage.

The caterpillar attached itself on a leaf with (I am told) silk thread!

It hung there for a few days (I didn't record how many). We could see the colour changing from vibrant to a murky almost dead-like shade.

The next stage really surprised me as I had only seen cocoons before. They were made by moths and not part of the cycle as chrysalises are. Someone happened to be around and see the caterpillar split its' skin for the last time. The alert was sounded and we managed to watch as it actually wiggled itself out and discarded its' skin.

It hung by the silk thread and rotated itself until its shape was the classic chrysalis. The colour was jade green. A pattern of the most beautiful gold appeared within the day.

After a few days, the green slowly turned translucent until we could see the developing butterfly inside.

The monarch chrysalis is gorgeous.

Twice we missed the butterfly breaking out. This is such a quick process, with both chrysalis I was around, observing them, and found them completely emerged coming back within ten minutes...