Animal week

Buna!

On our animal week we talked each day of a different animal:
- Monday: ants  /  Luni: furnici

- Tuesday: octopus  / Marți: caracatiță

- Wednesday: animal world map 

- Thursday: monkey  / Joi : maimuță

- Friday: parrot / Vineri; papagal

We started our "ants day" talking in circle about this animal. Our kids know a lot of things about ants, and we gave them more information about ants life, like:

- Ants can be black, red, yellow, green, orange and silver.
- Ants common size is 1cm but they can be even 5cm.
- They can live from 3 months to 3 years, and some queens can live even 20 years.
- Ants are social insects and they live in hierarchy with work division in roles: queen, soldiers and workers.

- They are all over the world except in Antarctica.

After an active talk about ants life, we drew different ants (in this moment we knew their colors, sizes and roles) and we drew their house in a big paper.For understand better the life of an ant we played different games: 
- we were ants and we had balloons to represent our eggs and larvae
- we were workers
- we were soldiers defending our queen
- we were soldiers defending our home of other insects...

For our "octopus day" we also had a circle-talk about octopus, and we learned some new things like: 

- Octopus have a big head, and inside is its brain, and 3 hearts.
- Octopus sizes are from 15 cm to 6m.

- They eat fishes.

- They are so shy and usually they are hidden.

- Octopus are very smart and strong.

We learned to draw an octopus using our hands like a model for the legs. If you want to draw an octopus in this way you have to put on the paper only 4 fingers of each hand, matching both index fingers. These 8 fingers will be the legs of your octopus, then you have to draw the head and complete the draw with eyes, noses, mouth but NO ears because octopus are deaf! And don't forget to draw suckers in the legs! We colored our octopus with blue, purple and orange, most common colors. We played games to understand how octopus defend itself: movement games in circle using our "ink tank". And we also played to be a big ocean with a lot of kind of fishes, specially sharks and dolphins and we had to discover where it was hidden the octopus. 

On our monkey day, after our circle-talk, we drew monkeys in a paper and we also drew big tails to holding them in a tree we drew on the black board.  
And after we played like monkeys we watched an animal movie I really love of my childhood: The Lion king.

On our parrot day we had the silhouette of a parrot in a big paper and we had to fullfill it with feathers we made of color papers.

Kids love animals, and they really enjoy talk about the amazing animal world. It was a funny week and we learn a lot of new things.
We will repeat another animal week in the future! :D

Al :)

Crafts II

On this months we have made a lot of different crafts with the kids I want to show you:

- Aquarium:

- Collage with beans and pasta:

 - Painting a house in the floor in a big paper with crayons for a theater decoration:

Our kids like a lot to make crafts and they really enjoy it. It's a good way to use new materials, use materials in different ways, reuse and recycle.

Al :)

Educators week

Buna!

Usually we prepare our activities with the kids week by week trying to combine creativity, movement, culture, fun and new things for them. Usually we have an idea which will be the topic of the week (music, theater, drawing, animals, dancing, sports...) and we develop specific activities and games for each day. We use our skills and tools we have of our training and work and personal experiences with kids to create our timetables. We work all together in this process which starts with a brainstorming in our living-room :).

One week our project team offered us an "educators week": a week completely planned by the educators with their own activities.

I will explain you how it was in Vila Raluca with the small kids:

In my Vila the educators are so good with crafts so we did quilling and crochet.

 

I've never done quilling before so all the kids teach me to make beautiful flowers.

We also played games, sang romanian songs and they teached me to dance romanian traditional dances like hora:

                                                 

And there was a special activity: cooking sarmale, a traditional romanian plate. 

 

Ingredients:
- Minced meat (half pork half beef)
- Cabbage
- Rice
- Onions
- Tomato sauce
- Salt, pepper, chopped dill, cimbru
- Oil   

We also cooked vegetarian sarmale, so instead of rice with meat, we use rice with potato, onion, carrot and tomato.

Sarmale is served with sour cream and mamaliga which is a porridge made out of yellow maize flour, traditional in Romania and Moldova.

Sarmale needs 3 hours to be cooked so after the waiting we ate full plates all together:

Al :)