Though it's only February, we've been lucky to be able to enjoy
some milder, more spring-like weather. With that in mind, as well as being over
winter myself, I decided to do a quick and messy activity to get the kids
excited for spring! Bowtie pasta butterfly paintings. We began by using our hot
glue gun skills to carefully glue our bow tie pastas to our paper, then got
right into designing and painting our 'spring scene.' Most of the kids painted
their butterflies with bright colours accompanied by a classic nature scene -
grass, sun shining, flowers or trees. A couple of the kids got really creative
though; Isaac used his pasta shells to form a tree as opposed to using them for
butterflies which looked super cool! Lucy used her pasta
shells as frets of a guitar which I thought was so outside the box - very
impressed!
After all this talk of milder weather, with spring also comes
RAIN, lots and lots of rain! Keep in mind that even if it's sprinkling outside, we may still take the kids outside to the playground to run around and
let off steam, so make sure your child has appropriate rain gear! Rainboots,
raincoat, extra socks (this one is key), even mittens if you so choose.
It was just last weekend where many of us celebrated Valentine's Day and so, many of our
kids handed out cards at school and out of school care! At first thought,
Valentine's Day seems like a day to celebrate the romantic type of love, but
one particular little girl at our program reminded me that it's about all sorts
of love. She had noticed that some of the kids' Valentine's mailboxes were
emptier than others, so she and Gemma decided that they were going to spend the
afternoon trying to make cards for everyone at out of school care to make sure
that everyone went home with something.
We also talked about what Valentine's Day meant to a group of kids who I ran an
art with last Wednesday. I asked them if they knew what the holiday was for,
just expecting my question to be a quick segway into our activity, but they
actually spent several minutes talking about it. They were very aware that
Valentine's Day is a time to not only write to a crush, but also to show your
friends, teachers, parents and siblings how much you appreciate their love,
friendship or their "friend love" for one another.
For the past couple weeks we’ve introduced yoga as a new activity here at junior osc. We had Stuart run this activity on Friday and with all the kids signing up we had a great turn out for the class. To set the yoga atmosphere we had the lights dimmed and relaxing music playing in the background. Before the kids could enter our room of zen there were two rules they had to abide by:
1) No Shoes 2) No Yelling
Stu gathered everyone in a circle and started with breathing exercises to calm the room, this helped us focus on rule #2. Next, he introduced a handful of moves to the kids. The most common pose’s taught were the airplane, downward dog and the tree stance which was the most popular pose. After showing them our poses and once the kids got comfortable they were free to create their own moves. We had Emily lying on her stomach while grabbing her ankles with her back arched; she called it the bow pose. This became a fun and creative part of our activity as many unique yoga poses began to emerge. After all the fun ended we had many sweaty faces with some still practicing what they had learned. We continue to encourage healthy lifestyles through physical activity and I recommend everyone to give yoga a try.
Couldn’t we all use
one? Well the kids sure got one this week. Nails and hair gel have always been
a favourite with our kids, but we’ve stepped up our salon game! We’ve recently
added hair chalk to our list of services, and better yet – it’s free (ha-ha)!
All the kids were rocking the best styles this afternoon, with everything
from rainbow nails to rainbow hair. Today’s salon brought out a whole bunch of
characters from our kids; one decided they were going to have fire hair,
another was a mermaid, and a third became a hair and nail model.
Ombré
What really took off this afternoon, and has been in style for a while,
was the ombré. Our early techniques involved only three to four colours, as ombré is
quite a difficult technique to master, but by the end of the day we had
seven coloured rainbows going every which way possible. Please remember to wash
out with shampoo and condition before getting into those white bed sheets!