Well, Mom and Dad, you made it... You survived 5 different themed days in one week. And Spring has come to our classroom, including to our sensory bin! In our photo-taking adventures last week, many of the students were unsurprisingly very taken with the cherry blossom trees. We decided to investigate these trees a little further and discovered that they're actually not from BC, but are in fact from Japan! We enjoyed looking up Japan on Google Earth and seeing how far it is from our school. We also learned that there are many different kinds of cherry blossom trees and, armed with a picture directory, we went looking for some of the types that we could see around our neighborhood. Madame carefully took some samples (we usually want to leave flowers where they are for everyone...and the bees!...to enjoy them!), and we tried to match the samples to the photos. Our investigation of plants in general continues, as well, as we watch our bean plants sprout and grow larger by the day. We made our own little plant booklets to help us learn some of the French words to describe the parts of a plant, and we discussed what each of these parts does. The "Earth hero" that we've been looking at this week is David Attenborough. We learned all about his love of animals and about how he wanted to do whatever he could to protect them. In discussing what we, ourselves, could do to help animals, we came to the conclusion that we should pick up litter together so that the animals wouldn't eat it and get sick. On Thursday, we did just that! We loved working together to find every last scrap of paper, plastic, glass and metal that we could find around the school grounds and into Spirit Square. And speaking of animals, we have some new classroom pets! ...dart frogs! Now, Madame has a very interesting story to tell about raising native tree frogs in the classroom last year. Let's just say that the government got involved. Things got messy. And Madame was stuck raising 19 baby tree frogs, frantically trying to find a shelter for them before the government acted on their promise to seize them. Ask her about it later. She has much to say on this topic. Don't take species from their natural habitat. It's illegal. Lesson of the day. Soooo... as much as she prefers to have species native to our area in the classroom, this was NOT an option with frogs. The next best thing... dart frogs! They have been born in captivity and (sadly) will remain in captivity. But we sure do enjoy looking at their beautiful colours! One of the yellow and black ones is pregnant and will be laying an egg soon in the little film canisters in our vivarium. We can't wait to watch the metamorphosis process and are already enraptured with trying to spot them in their little habitat! The yellow and black ones seem to be more daring. The blue ones have been incredibly difficult to spot, darting away as soon as our shadows approach, but a few of us have managed to catch a glimpse of them. Feeding time was especially exciting today as we watched about a tablespoon of wingless fruit flies wriggling around in a container before Adriana got to dump them into the frog habitat. There was some concern that we wouldn't be able to do our "Jump Rope for Heart" event today because of the weather, but in the end, we went ahead with it. We had a lot of fun doing the different challenges! Extra pics...
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