May 2015

Thanks so much for your support in helping fund raise for QPPS. The hockey pool will be wrapping up (and so timely with our Canucks hitting the golf course!), and the winners will be announced at the May general meeting.Last chance for meat pies! There will be forms to fill out for Adams meat pies by the sign in sheet, they will be due May 20.

Sorry for all you who have been saving your old toys and furniture – there will be no Queens Park Preschool yard sale this year. You might have to have your own garage sale!

And finally, a date for pub night is still to be announced.

Thanks again for all the fundraising you have contributed this year.

Parent Education

Follow-Up from Jessica
Our speaker from last month, Jessica Wollen, passes along her gratitude for our attendance, participation, and enthusiasm at her presentation.  As promised, she has some excellent resources for us to take a look at and share with other families:

The Vancouver School Board Sexual Health Education Resource List is available as a PDF download: VSBResourceList2014. This resource spans all ages, and was designed for caregivers, educators and librarians – bringing more books into schools and public libraries increases the community capacity to understand and speak about sexuality and healthy relationships.

Jessica’s favourites:
•    Options for Sexual Health Education, the governing body that provides Sexual Health Educator Certification, has lots of resources for parents and youth (https://www.optionsforsexualhealth.org/).
•    Sex Sense phone line, 1-800-sex-sense.  Open Monday to Friday 9am – 9pm.  If you don’t know how to answer a question, call them!
•    Netsmartz online safety site (http://www.netsmartz.org/).  Side note from Jessica: sponsorship for this site comes from some companies she doesn’t support (weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin), however, they have good ideas for kids, youth, and parents about how to stay safe online. Please review this site as a good start for child proofing devices and understanding parental controls.

Jessica has a number of ways to connect with her online:
Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/ShiftEdu – like her Facebook page and see great resources, articles, current events, and upcoming presentations she’s doing.
Pinterest:  https://www.pinterest.com/shifteducation/ – excellent resources such as age specific boards that she is always adding to.
Website:  www.shift-education.com – website has info about what she does (a work in progress).

If you liked her workshop, please spread the word.  With more parents wanting meaningful Sexual Health Education for their children and youth, more lessons will be put in place for our kids.

What’s Up for May?
Kathy Flood joins us on May 5 at 7pm for Awakening the Gifts Within: Encouraging Virtues in your children.  This talk explains how to bring out the potential virtues in your child and to develop their inner conscience.  The use of the five strategies will be introduced with an emphasis on Speaking the Language of the Virtues using acknowledgements, guidance and correction in a framework that nurtures the innate virtues in your child.

Kathy Flood holds a Master’s degree in Counselling Psychology and is a Master facilitator for the Virtues Project.  She has given numerous workshops on developing your child’s character to both preschool and elementary parents.  She currently works part-time as an elementary school counsellor and full time as a mother of four.

Have an overdue book?
While we don’t actually have due dates for resources borrowed from the QPPS parent education library, we do request that all materials be returned by the end of the school year.

Fun With Science

Goo Recipe

What is needed:

• Cornstarch (available at the grocery store)
• Water
• Bowl or dish

What to Do:
This is a very messy experiment – but it cleans up really easily. Go somewhere that you can make a bit of a mess first.Take some cornstarch, and put some in the bowl.

Add water, slowly. As you add the water, stir the water into the cornstarch. Don’t use a spoon – use your hands to do this. This is part of the fun, and you will also be able to tell when you have put in enough water! The key is to add just enough water so that the cornstarch and water mix will flow very, very slowly. But if you pour it, it will flow like water! Here are some things to try:

• Smack it! If you hit the mixture really hard, it might even break.
• Pour it from hand to hand. If you go slowly, it will pour freely.
• Roll it into a ball. If you keep rolling, you can roll it into a nice ball. Of course, as soon as you stop rolling, it will ooze and turn back into a puddle.
• Bounce it! If you get the right consistency, you can even bounce a ball of this goo!

What is Happening:

The cornstarch is made up of long chains of atoms – a polymer. These chains can move past each other, but they take some time to do this. If you pour it slowly, it can flow like a liquid. If you try to force things and make the chains slide more quickly than they want to, they get entangled – and the mixture gets firmer. So if you push hard on it, it acts more like a solid.

The real explanation is actually a bit more complicated than this. But the exact workings of mixtures like this is something that is not all that well understood. Folks sometimes get upset when there is no really good answer for things in science, but really that’s a good thing – if we already knew everything there was to know, there would be no reason to try new things – and what’s the fun in that?

Source: Little Shop of Physics
Bouncy Egg Experiment

Yes, we know that an egg is so fragile you cannot knock it too hard or it will break. But there is actually a way you can make an egg bounce without breaking it.

Are you ready to make an egg bounce? You will need the following materials for the experiment:

• White vinegar
• Boiled egg
• Glass jar

Procedures

Take a raw egg and boil it. Place the boiled egg inside the glass jar and pour white vinegar into the jar until the boiled egg is fully immersed in it. Put the lid back on and close the jar tightly. Set it aside and away from direct sunlight for a full day and observe what happens to the egg. Leave it for another week before you drain the egg from the vinegar. Rinse the egg in tap water and dry it.

What did you observe when you placed the egg into a jar of vinegar? What did you see after leaving it for one whole day?

If you noticed small bubbles forming around the egg, that is completely normal. After some time you will notice that the bubbles grow bigger and eventually rise to the surface of the white vinegar. After some time, the egg will start to float due to the bubbles that have gathered around it. The shell of the egg then starts to decompose because of the vinegar. After a week has passed, notice that the eggshell has decomposed completely. Once you take it out, feel the texture of the egg. It feels leathery doesn’t it? Now, what’s even more exciting is that it will bounce if you try to bounce it against the floor. Try it!

What is Happening?

The Magic Egg experiment actually demonstrates the process of osmosis. Osmosis is the movement of liquid from a solution of lower concentration to a more concentrated solution through a semi-permeable substance. Permeable means fluids or gases are able to pass through the material. In the Magic Egg experiment, the vinegar slowly diffuses through the eggshell until it dissolves it completely leaving the egg rubbery or leathery in texture.

So what is in the vinegar that gives it the ability to dissolve the eggshell? Vinegar is an acid. Specifically, it contains acetic acid, which reacts with calcium – the primary component of eggshell. As the eggshell breaks down, carbon dioxide is produced which

Source: www.expolorable.com

3-Year Old Class Information

What an amazing Spring we have been having!  Fantastic ever changing weather, visitors galore and lots of silly, messy, arts and crafts fun! During April we have had the pleasure of welcoming police officers, a police dog,  bunnies, snails, and a bee keeper! For Easter we painted sugar cookies with icing, hunted for eggs and made bunny hats. We also learned how to make an egg become rubbery and bouncy!

Our three year old group has really been enjoying indoor and outdoor water play, goop, wall painting, wood and glue sculpture making, finger painting and  tissue paper “stained glass” creations. Continuing from March interest in bugs and snails we have expanded our exploration of all things creepy crawly.  We have been using our magnifying glasses inside and out to find and identify pill bugs, worms, millipedes, caterpillars, butterflies, snails, flies and bees to name a few! Bubbles, birds and butterfly wings…. talking about and observing how things move in the wind has been an impromtu lesson…. A big part of our classroom play and circle times have been based on the theme of growing and planting and creatures we might find in a garden setting. We will likely continue with these themes until the end of May.  Watch how our sunflowers grow!

We have included information about two of the science experiments we have explored this past month. We hope you try them at home!

See You Later Alligator
In a While Crocodile
Out the door Dinosaur
Chop chop Lollipop
See you soon Baboon
Take care Polar Bear
Give a hug Lady bug
In an hour Sunflower
Maybe two Kangaroo
Better swish Jellyfish
Chow chow Brown Cow
Better shake Rattle Snake
Bye bye Butterfly
Gotta go Buffalo
Blow a kiss Goldfish
Be sweet Parakeet!

On Tuesday, May 19 everyone is welcome to join us the last half hour of class for Snack Time! We will prepare some Nutz ‘n Boltz to share with everyone on the grass hill outside. This is an opportunity for your child to invite someone who might not have had the chance to see inside your preschool, however everyone is welcome to join us. Please bring a blanket to sit on and a little sunshine too and we’ll see you there!  (In the event of rain, we will be inside so please consider limiting guests to two per child!  Thank you!)

From Teacher Jenny and Teacher Donna

4-Year Old Class Information

Spring is here! This past month we welcomed snails into the classroom and the children have enjoyed watching and carefully handling the snails. We have observed the snails and talked their different parts (did you know they have one foot and two horns and two eyes on stalks?) Some of the children have drawn snails and others have created clay snails. We are still looking forward to doing some snail races and building a snail “playground”. We have also continued building incredible block structures (using every block in the preschool!) as well as building homes for the birds. After collecting many sticks and talking about what birds use to build nests, the children built their own nests with clay, twigs, moss, string and feathers……some nests even had birds and eggs in them. Other highlights from this month include:
–    Many inside-outside days and LOTS of water
–    Walks in the forests to climb on logs and explore
–    Having an egg hunt (one official one and many, many impromptu ones!)
–    Discovering jewels in the sandbox….and then creating a mountain and starting to “mine” it
–    Telling jokes and riddles
–    Creating our own “bugs on a log” with celery, cream cheese, raisins, dried blueberries and dried cranberries
–    Completing our masterpiece “Big Painting Wall”

During the month of May we will continue to have inside-outside days. As the days become warmer please send a sun hat with your child, and if needed please put sunscreen on your child before coming to preschool. We have already had a few wonderful visitors to the classroom including a train dad and a firefighter… still to come are a few more firefighters (and possibly a fire truck!), a police officer, a violin playing dad, a square dancing grandma, and  banjo/ukulele playing grandparents. We will finish the month off with a visit from OWL bird refuge.

This month we also plan to explore the idea of building other types of house… an interest we have heard from the children, such as tents, lookouts and “hideouts”. We will also get out the shovels and do some more “mining” and exploring of rocks. To help us with these interests we are looking for:

One very large tent (that is quick to set up), jewels and other “treasures” that you don’t need back, rocks of various sizes (smooth if possible)

There are a few special events this month:

• Pizza Day on May 13 – we will have a sign up for toppings
• Family Tea Party on May 20 – We would like to invite each child to bring up to two adult members of their family to come to the party (Younger siblings are welcome too). We will have a sign up so that we know how many guests to plan for. The children will have a regular preschool session until tea party time. The party will start at 10:45 am for the morning class and 1:45 pm for the afternoon class. Any family members coming should be there a few minutes early, so that we can start on time….as the children will be excited for the party to begin. Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Things to Remember:
•    Victoria Day May 18 -The preschool is closed

Have a wonderful month!

From Teacher Barb and Teacher Eleanor