As part of our topic, ‘New year, new life’, the SK children have been learning about the seasons. They have been talking about how the trees and bushes that lose their leaves over the winter, especially in colder climates, begin to grow new leaves again and start to flower in spring. They have learnt that the temperature of the air and soil starts to warm up as the days get longer with the coming of spring. That’s why spring called the season of flowers.

The process of flowers opening up is part of a flowering plant’s life cycle. Blooming occurs when the petals in a bud start to grow to the point that they fill with enough water that the only place to go is out.

We found a ‘blooming marvellous’ science activity that showed us a simple explanation of how this happens.

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Do you Remember, remember the 5^th November?

The SK children learned a little bit about what is special about this date before our Bonfire Night party at Bay Bistro. We talked about how to stay safe by not going near the fire and standing back to watch the fireworks. We talked about how fireworks are used to celebrate other festivals and events such as Diwali – the festival of light, 4^th July, the start of a New Year in many countries, weddings and even special birthdays.

The children thought about all the warm colours that they would see in the bonfire and they used these colours to create a wonderful display of red, orange and yellow stripy paintings. It really brightens our classroom up and makes us feel happy.

We then focused on the beautiful firework display that goes along with the bonfire.

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On 11^th November, Remembrance Day, we talked about remembering, showing respect and honouring the brave people who have helped to keep us safe and have made where we live the safe and peaceful place that it is today. We all deserve to live in peace.

We wondered…  what does peace mean?

Peace is when you smile at someone and make the world a tiny bit brighter
Peace is when you hear a baby laugh, or give a hug to the hurt.
— Excerpt from a poem by 10-year-old Amaya M from Winnipeg

One way to show respect on Remembrance Day, or Poppy Day, as we sometimes call it, is to wear a poppy to show respect and remember soldiers and other people who have helped us in our lives.

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The Senior Kindergarten children in the Gecko class are

Groovy,

Enthusiastic,

Clever,

Kind and

Oh, so cool!

We love being called the Gecko Class because…

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In Kindergarten, we have been learning all about Life Cycles. We have been very lucky to watch a Hummingbird life cycle play out right in front of our eyes, in the Early Years playground.

As we were studying birds, we talked about the simple life cycle of a chicken and of course we had to consider the question:

Which came first… the chicken or the egg?

The Kindergarten children thought long and hard, discussing the facts.  Then they had to decide which one they thought came first.

This is what they thought… [Read more…]

As part of our Kindergarten topic on ‘The Senses’, we found foods with very distinctive smells like coffee, lemon, cinnamon and vinegar. We put them into containers on our investigation table and the children were free to smell each one and describe what it smelled like. They had to guess what they thought it was. There were a few funny faces and wrinkled noses as you can see from the photos.

We then went on to learn that our taste buds help us to taste all sorts of different food. The bumps on our tongue are home to our taste buds. Did you know that you have about 10,000 taste buds on your tongue, and they help you to taste the four types of tastes of salty, sour, bitter, and sweet? We learnt that the front of our tongue helps us to taste sweet things, the back of our tongue helps us to taste bitter things and the sides of our tongue help us to taste salty and sour things. Just like the picture below…

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Run, run as fast as you can,

You can’t catch us,

We’re the Kindergarten Clan!

The Kindergarten class has had a lot of fun listening to the traditional tale ‘The Gingerbread Man’.

We listened to many different versions of the story and looked at what is the same in each version and what is different. The Kindergarten children noticed that there is a fox in every version but that the other animals can be different. Some stories just have a horse and cow, in others there is a pig, a cockerel, a dog and a cat. Which version have you heard and which do you like the most?

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This term SK have been learning all about dinosaurs!  We have researched their names, features, environments, characteristics and evolution… we’re pretty much dinosaur experts!

This week, we used an art book to teach us how to draw and paint our favourite dinosaurs.  We discovered you have to draw them in steps, starting from the head, then you add the neck, body and legs.  Of course, paleontologists cannot be 100% sure what colours each species of dinosaur was, so we made our own interpretations.

After completing our pencil drawings, we took the time to mix water colour paints and carefully decorate our dinosaurs.  Can you see the stripes, spots and patterns in our pictures?

At first, we thought we were just doing an art activity, then we realised that we were actually practising our fine motor skills as we carefully mixed and painted our water colours.  Would you believe we practised them again when we cut our dinosaurs out using the art scissors?  Finally, using the phonices we have learned this year, we labelled our pictures with the dinosaurs’ names.  We think that maybe Miss Claire tricked us into ‘thinking’ we were just drawing and painting, when really we were practising so many other skills too!

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It was a first time experience for many of the Senior Kindergarten class last week when Miss Laranda showed us something quite unique.  After learning all about South Caicos and the other islands in the Turks and Caicos, Miss Laranda gave us an amazing insight as to how local fish make it from the ocean on to our plates.

Miss Laranda brought in a grouper caught in South Caicos by her father and set about the process of making it into fish fingers.  Using the newly refurbished school garden, Miss Laranda thoroughly cleaned the fish, sliced off the skin and took the opportunity to show us the different parts of the fish.

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At Provo Primary School, we aim to provide our early years children with the tools to be able to achieve the three characteristics of effective learning…Playing and Exploring; Active Learning and Creating and Thinking Critically.  There are lots of ways to achieve this and here is just one of our wow moments…

Have a listen to the children’s beat and rhythm in the nursery rhymes and the traditional Turks and Caicos Islands songs, accompanied by junkanoo inspired instruments.

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We all know that mummies are very special ladies.  So, this Mother’s Day, Kindergarten class, decided to show them just how much they mean to us by throwing them an Afternoon Tea Party.

In preparation for our special afternoon, we made Mother’s Day bookmarks, crowns and completed questionnaires all about our mummies.  When they arrived, they were fitted with their crowns (so we could treat them like queens) and shown into the transformed classroom.  Decorated with paper chains, flowers (made by the children) and messages of love, the mummies really were shocked by how different the room looked.

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