Welcome Clodia!

We were so happy to welcome Clodia, Beckett’s little sister to our class on the second floor. She spent many happy hours with us and we look forward to welcoming her back next week. Winter welcomed us too today and said: “I am not ready to leave yet!” We were so happy to stay warm and dry inside our classrooms and look out of the window at the rain falling down and feeding the earth so that the plants and trees can be fed and grow. Our focus this month is on growth and plants and how things evolve; how they change and how we have changed since we were born. Upstairs in our discussion, we focused on “What Babies can do? We read the book “Babies Sign” and all had a chance to give our thoughts about them. We think that babies cannot say: “I’m hungry; I want to read a book; I want to jump etc”. They cannot express their needs with words however they can do this in many different ways. They can cry; they can point to something; they can smile etc. Language as they say in Reggio Emilia can be expressed in 100’s of ways. We know that people can even talk to us with their eyes and their heads and their hands and their mouths; we also know that even though many of us cannot read the print in books, we still can understand the story by looking at the pictures. It is fun to discover the meaning of things in this way. We spoke about the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly and looked at the story of the “Very Hungry Caterpillar”. We noticed that it started off really small and over time it became really big. In our activity at the tables today, we made a large green leafy background using sponges, paint brushes, leaves, our hands etc. We will be making a display of how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and this will be the background. It will be a group project. During music we did many different actions and each time we had to think whether babies could do these actions. We said that they knew how to wave their arms but we didn’t think that they knew how to stamp their feet. We laughed because babies cannot stand so they definitely cannot stamp their feet. If we think outside of the box, we will realize though that babies CAN stamp their feet when they are sitting down.

Downstairs, we benefitted from things that Shelley was reminded about at the conference she attended on the weekend as well as a visit she made to a Kindergarten in Kakio. She put out scarves for us during music and we each took our own one, waved it in the air and then some of us shared a scarf and waved it in the air. We used our imagination and listened to the music and expressed our feelings with the scarf. We also did something which made our teachers think; we laid the scarves on the carpet and lay down on them as if they were blankets.

Then we read a book called “In the Garden”. There were many different pictures of the things that you find in a garden and they were not only of plants and insects. Some of the photos were of things that we play with e.g. a bicycle, a small swimming pool, cups, a bucket etc. We tried to name many of the things in the book and could show our teachers how much we know. They think that we know so much already! We used the information from the book and then played with butterflies that you put on your Peter Pointer finger. We listened to the music and waved our hands as if they were flying from flower to flower. We discovered that we have a container with bugs in it and we played with the bugs. They are plastic so we didn't mind playing with them at all and Yossi was amazed when he touched his one.......and it didn't move.

Then we pretended that we were a dog, a cat, a worm, a rabbit, a frog, a plant, and dramatized how we think they look and behave. Of course when we pretended that we were a dog, we crawled on all fours and barked. It was a fun day.

Love Shelley, Darren, Goh, Marie and Kana