Sunday, November 20, 2011

Thanksgiving & Season Tree

 This Thanksgiving we made pumpkin shape cookies and decorated them with peoples names we are thankful for in our lives.  YUMMY!
We also added cut out pumpkins to our season tree and wrote out things we were thankful for.  Our sesason tree is covered with various fall art and leaves we have collected.

Canada Puzzle

 Maya put together a basic map of Canada.  She was fascinated by how long it would take one to travel across the country.  Maya also loves learning about the different types of activities, families and peoples that live across our Country.  We just finished reading about the Huddrites. 
Maya and Norah enjoyed an extensive play with their squinky toys travelling accross each province. 

Reading

Maya and Norah LOVE having books read to them.  Grandma also loves books.  Put them together and you have a book reading party! 
Maya is also enjoying reading lots to herself these days.  You can find her reading the beginner Bernstein Bears book or reading books to Eleah. 

Halloween

 Pumpkin Carving
Spooky with and ghost bride with a paper boy?

Charting our Nerve Endings

We played a little games with some chopsticks.  One person had to close their eyes and the other person would poke them with either one or two chopsticks (gently).  The closed eye person would have to guess if their was one or two chopsticks poking them.  Maya's discovered that her hands, face and feet she would guess correctly but her legs, arms, tummy or back she would get mixed up.  Maya made a diagram of where she guessed right and wrong.  She discovered we have more nerve endings (sensitivity) in our hands, feet and face.

Diwali

 We celebrated Diwali at Kali's house,

Aquarium




Physical Activity!

 Cirkids pyramid
 New bike for Maya, therefore, new bike for Norah.  The girls love riding their bikes whenever possible.

Music and Drama

Maya is in a drama group called The East Side Story Guild.  She is part of a play coming up at the end of this month.  The group focuses on building community and drama skills.  They create lots of the props. 

Maya is also still playing the Violin.  She takes weekly lessons and performs regularly for the family!

Calendar

 Maya LOVED making her November Calendar.  She wrote all the numbers and stickered up a storm for her daily activities.  She has been counting down for her big East Side Story Guild drama production coming up at the end of this month. 

Math makes you want to Jump!

 Maya has been enjoying her first crack at "Jump Math".  She loves numbers.  Maya has been also beginning to makes sense of cents.  We play store with real coins and Maya is beginning to understand the various values of cents up to a $1

Writingrinting

 Lower Case and Upper Case alphabet.
 Maya every single day is writing up a storm mostly through sounding words out on her own.  There are letter, posters, notes and stories that get put out by the dozens every week by Maya.  We do practice printing and spelling but mostly Maya does her own inventive and phonetic spelling. 
 Practicing printing
 Watching the history of writing with Elias and Mateo
We had a "practicing our printing" playdate with Elias and Mateo

Salmon Hatchery



 We went to the Capilano Salmon Hatchery with our Friday group friends.  There were soooo many fish jumping around. 

Map of My Heart



We read a book with our friend Brigitte about a little girls map of all the things in her life.  Maya, Norah and Brigitte all made a map of their hearts

Art

 Maya and Norah take an art class once a week at a place called "The Pod."  They have experimented with colour, used pastels and paints, sewed and weaved.  They love their teacher named Carlin. 
The girls daily do ALOT of spontaneous art with their pencil crayons and felts. 
This is our art wall at home in our dining room.  We eat and look at art.  Beautiful!

Playing Playing Playing

 Maya love to play with her Squinkies, dolls, and sisters.

Lynn Canyon Ecology Centre

Maya and Norah went on a Lynn Canyon guided tour called "The Forest at your Feet".
 We made moss buttons with a button making machine.

 We discovered so many different living organism that we didn't even new existed. 
 The streams and ponds held so much life in them.

Naramata with Friday Group

We invited our Friday group this past September to Naramata, BC.  We stayed at Maya's grandparents house while they were away for a whole week!


We spent a lot of time nature.  Our friend Allison took us on a nature walk.


She showed us the Ponderosa Pine trees. We learned they were native to the region.


The bark of the poderosa pine trees smells like Vanilla . . . .who new! We also learned the how imortant forest fires are for the Okanagan forests.  The seeds in the pine cones need the heat from the fire be released to therefore to grow.


Allison invited us back to her beautiful back yard to see what one can grow. . . .

Lavender . . . smells amazing.


Allison has 6 chickens...


The chickens lay all different colours of eggs including a blue one.  She gave us a dozen eggs that we happily ate all up. 

She let us pull carrots from her garden.  There were a lot.






Oh the sunflowers.  Huge and yellow.






The last day we had big adventure and road bikes to an orchard. 







We got to pick apples, peaches and corn.  It was so great for us all to see where the food that we love to eat grows from.  Pasture to Plate at its best . . . in person!







Rod and his wife owned the orchard.  Rod was such a nice funny man who sold us ice cream too from his little shop.




 We LOVED the ice cream.  mmmmmmmmm!!!