Making Paper

We tried making paper this week, which involved boiling up old paper in a pot, and then blending it! We thought it looked like paper soup.

And then we placed the "soup" on homemade screens to flatten out and dry. The kids added some fancy sparkly red paper to the mix to liven it up.

A Trip to Little Jamaica

As part of Black History Month in February, we learned about different cultural traditions from Africa and the Caribbean that now make up a part of Canadian culture. We decided to take a long bus ride up to Eglinton and Oakwood to check out Little Jamaica for some Oxtail and some sweet fried dumplings known as "Festivals".

Chinese New Year

We celebrated Chinese New Year all week with the kids. Starting off the week, we met up with the Cycling Giants at the drama and dance studio at Bellwoods. We learned, and acted out,  a folk tale about the animals in the Chinese zodiac. We finished off the session by each taking turns playing the dragon head and body and chasing around candy. Fun times!

Come Up To My Room

This was definitely one of our highlights last month! The Come Up To My room exhibition was a great show, with so many fun and interactive exhibits. Although we didn't take any photographs of our visit, here are a couple of our favourite installations:

"Shrine dedicated to the memory of demolished barns and fallen trees” by Scott Eunson and Lubo Brezina.

"Wish you were here" by Denise Ing and Ken Leung.


Also enjoyable was LeuWebb's installation in the Gladstone Ballroom, where the Pouncing Pumas and Cycling Giants had a great time playing with the lights and the stage for some time.

National Film Board Mediatheque

A couple weeks ago we took a little field trip to the National Film Board. The kids enjoyed picking out their films to watch, and especially enjoyed The Cat Came Back, The Sweater, and Christopher, Clean Up Your Room.

Shoes!

I took the kids to the Bata Shoe Museum this week. They really liked all of the exhibits, but their favourite displays were the sock exhibit and the Junos room. They liked the latter mostly because there were a bunch of iPads set up as a listening station and in the sock room there was a puppet theatre set up. Voila:

Fun at Dufferin Grove Park

Now that the weather is colder and there is ice and snow all around, we've been making a few trips to Dufferin Grove Park for skating. Just before the holidays, we made a trip with our friends the Cycling Giants.

All tuckered out and waiting for the skates to come off!

And sometimes we go to Dufferin Grove and get distracted by the huge piles of snow so that we forget about skating entirely!

Though there's always time to warm up next to the fire with a hot chocolate and a game of checkers.