Weekly Activities

Today we looked at pictures of trees from India,  Trinidad and British Columbia.  We talked about the similarities and differences of the banyan tree (India), the poui tree (Trinidad) and the cedar tree (BC)  The children chose the type of tree they wanted to paint an image of.  We had many paintings of the poui tree! Yesterday when we finished planting the tomato seeds, we had packaging to throw away. The children recalled "reduce, reuse, recycle" when deciding where to put the waste.  We had a vote, the outcome was unanimous: reuse! Today, Julia and Nicki chose to make boats with our recycled materials.

We have received tomato seeds from Tomatosphere (http://www.tomatosphere.org/faq/).     Tomato sphere is sponsored  by  Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada , the  Canadian Space Agency ,  Heinz Canada Ltd ,  HeinzSeed ,  Ontario Centres of Excellence ,  Stokes Seeds  and the  University of Guelph . Tomatosphere is a research project that  involved about 13,000 Canadian classrooms this year. We are not submitting our findings to Tomatoshpere but our students will still have the opportunity to grow tomatoes from two sets of seeds. One set will be seeds which have been exposed to a simulated space environment and the other set will be the control group.   The research is being gathered to assist in identifying potential food sources for future space travel.  Over the summer the children will be growing these tomato seeds and charting our findings.  The children concluded that there are no plants in space and ...

Responsibility: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle We are learning that we have a far greater responsibility towards plants then just watering them.  The children already practice recycling and composting at Creative Minds but were unaware of the importance of their actions.  We looked at some pictures of landfills to show where our garbage goes.  The children could not believe the size of some of the landfills, in Nicki's words "garbage mountain!" We talked about what would happen if we didn't recycle and compost and the children were able to recognize that the landfill would be larger. I asked the children what does garbage in the landfill do to the plants and Rocco responded "it kills them because it squishes them."  We watched some Brainpop videos on recycling and waste management to help the children understand the positive effects of their actions at Creative Minds and home.  We concluded by playing some games on the Smartboard and sorting activitie...