Of course this time of year also brings Thanksgiving and in the classroom children made cranberry sauce to enjoy at home with their holiday meals. They measured, poured, and stirred and learned that Miss Barb's secret ingredient was orange zest! Careful grating yielded a beautifully-scented plateful of zest which went into the pot. The children were proud to be given the opportunity to use all of this proper kitchen equipment, and were interested in the smells, the look and the feel of all the different ingredients. Once it was ready each child got to take home a jar of the sauce to share with their families.

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As well as being busy with these seasonal activities the children's play has been revealing a strong interest: construction. Since the start of the year the open-ended construction resources have been extremely popular, and the explorations are becoming more focused on buildings that have specific purposes. The talk as they are built and re-built is about what they are for: houses with patios and garages, zoo buildings for housing animals and zoo vehicles, tracks elevated in the sky and, recently, whole towns. The theme has extended beyond the blocks and lego as well with drawings of tall condos and conversations about underground parking lots! We will be supporting this interest more fully in the coming weeks with different resources and activities, but we began with a walk up to the huge construction site on Dunbar. We observed how deep the excavation is and wondered why the crane has a criss-cross pattern. We spotted all the shapes we could see and watched concrete being poured out of the huge pump. As well as the purpose of various buildings there seems to be fascination with their actual structure, wondering about how to make buildings stable and the steps involved as they go up.

This is such a rich area for exploration and we are excited to see which elements capture the children's imaginations, as we reflect on how to support and extend their thinking.