WE STRIVE TO SEE THE WORLD FROM A KIDS-EYE-VIEW
Bellwoods Playschool uses a child-centred, socially conscious pedagogy to engage young children in social and artistic thought and action. Using what the city has to offer, we empower our students with the knowledge to be socially and environmentally responsible citizens while they develop into explorers of their urban landscape.

WE THINK OF THE CITY AS OUR CLASSROOM
A valuable aspect of the Bellwoods Playschool program is to empower children as navigators of their city. We journey on regular excursions, by foot and by public transportation, to art galleries, museums and cultural events, as well as markets, parks and city landmarks.

WE KNOW ITS TAKES A VILLAGE

Our Playschool runs on a model that links a range of artists together to engage and inspire children. We like to bring in different perspectives and actively pursue a diverse teaching staff. As such, professional educators and artists trade chalkboards for personal anecdotes and textbooks for real life experiences. Together, they create an atmosphere that is at once intellectually stimulating and deeply personalized.


Our Community

Tuesday, May 22, 2012





We love her music (& her music videos!) and now we've had the chance to visit Maylee Todd's house and learn how to play the harp and write funny songs.
Watch our favourite videos by Maylee, here:




Sunday, May 20, 2012

Friday, May 18, 2012

 We visited our new friend Patric McGroaty's house and learned all about looping sounds, pedals and the basics of layering to make a really cool electronic song! Listen to the final song, "wolf warriors are crazy awesome", linked below. 100% kids. 100% super cool.

http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F46640177&show_artwork=true

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

"Now Growing!" Every Monday we visit our greenhouse and get more and more excited for the tasty results to come. We've been taking turns writing in the log book what plants we watered, what the temperature of the greenhouse was and other updates for our other greenhouse friends to know.







With just some fabric and wood we made pins with our friend, Michelle!

Saturday, May 05, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyjLVG6A01o

Watch the Wolf Warriors instructional video on how to make an exploding volcano! Science experiments are super fun!

Thursday, May 03, 2012









Clay Animation workshop at the NFB. We all got the chance to create our own creature out of clay and then add them to a movie that we animated ourselves!
Carrying on our month of Photography and Film with guest and local talent, Joe Fuda.

We visited Oz Studio on Ossington to learn about photography and film with Joe. We took funny photos and videos that we will be posting soon....
Thanks, Joe!


Gardening at the Greenhouse!

After visiting Urban Harvest for our seeds we made our first trip to the greenhouse to plant our seeds (beans, tomatoes, spinach, edible flowers, and teddybear sunflowers (for our friend Ted) ) We've been back to water and some of them are already sprouting. The wolfies have been talking about making a big salad with their vegetables and having their family over for a potluck to enjoy all their green work.







Spring in High Park with the wonderful cherry trees. We made a visit to the beautiful trees and took group pictures that we could send to our new pen pals in Laos. Sharing some of our favourite sights in the city along with drawings we each made for our friends overseas. Can't wait to hear back!
The Wolfies are SERIOUS dancers! We visited the Canadian Opera Company for Bboyizm : The History of Breakdancing. The kids learned about the history of street dancing and learned fancy footwork from Soultrain to breakdancing moves and battling. Lots of fun learning about soul music and hip hop! Jack even volunteered to for the dance off at the concert...we all cheered on as he did the worm


We were so inspired by the performance we decided to practice our own moves...because we've been talking about film and video this month, we each took turns filming eachother dancing. hope you like it!

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Last Month in Review iii: Iguana's + Zombies

Learning about Habitats. Our visit to the Menagerie Pet Store! Saw the biggest Iguana in the city and meant some noisy parrots too! 
Thriller! Recreating a dance routine from Michael Jackson's Thriller.






Last Month in Review ii: Spring is Here!

Spring has arrived! Lots of fun exploring nature and seeing what winter left behind and what spring has for us around the corner. We found some snails and learned that you can find out how old a snail is by counting the amount of spirals on its shell.

Carnival day in Bellwoods! Paper Mache Volcano building lead to one messy explosion.





Last Month In Review - Camping + AGO!

Camping photos! Static hair in the tent! We learned how to set up the tent and spent the day camping in Dufferin Grove Park!

We made a visit to the AGO to see Sean Martindale's exhibition. We learned about the history of street art, saw some examples of graffiti in Toronto and then made our own pictures and added them to a large collage wall of photos that many others have been adding to. We were asked questions, such as, "What would you do if you were mayor?" We thought really hard about what we want for our city and wrote our answers down and placed them on the wall. 






Wednesday, April 04, 2012

Some Music Videos We Enjoyed!

We are going to make our own videos and films this month. To start, we are going to our own music videos. We looked at some interesting ones for inspiration. It was great to see everyone totally into them!

Video with a Storyline:


Video that doesn't make sense but is awesome anyway:


Animated Video:


Video with lots of colours:

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Art w/ Leah Gold

We learned about textures with visual artist Leah Gold. We visited Leah at her Chinatown studio and learned about textures through using different inks and drawing tools. Leah will turn our work into some sort of creature.