What can I do with my hands and feet?

 Tuesday is always a quieter day because there are fewer children at school. On Tuesdays we have a completely different experience at school with small classes and our teachers have fewer children to supervise. We like it both ways!

Downstairs we started off with play dough and free play on the mat and we decided that it was a little cooler today, so we would go outside later. Tokutaro shared his Thomas the Tank Engine game with us and we enjoyed pushing the buttons and hearing different voices. We also put all the cars together in a row and Ava took some and stored them in the front pocket of her dress.

After snack time we all sat together on the mat and read books and then Pinky, our pink dragon came to visit us. He joined in with some of our songs e.g. “Open them, shut them” and “Hello”. He remembered the words of the “Hello” songs almost as well as we did. He asked us if we could clap our hands and we could; he asked us if we could jump and we could; he asked us if we could tap our shoulders and we could; he asked us many things and fortunately we could do all of them. We are also focusing on what the different parts of our bodies can do and today we learnt that our hands are also for cutting with…….we sat at an activity table and did a combination of drawing and cutting. We drew in the middle of the paper and then did little snips around the edges. Some of our fingers also tore the paper; Shelley says that all of these activities are important for us to do as they strengthen our fingers, which is what we need when we learn to hold a pencil or marker correctly.

 We did hand prints today on the same paper that we had pasted pieces of tissue paper yesterday. We made enough pieces of paper, so that all of our friends can have one for their hand prints. It was quite ticklish when Shelley painted our hands. Lily didn’t really like it and was very happy when she went to wash her hands; Tokutaro did many hand prints in different colours; Ava enjoyed doing her hand prints and Vincent was curious when some pieces of tissue paper stuck to his hand. We had fun outside in the park and enjoyed eating our obentos.

Upstairs in the morning we used some beautiful metallic shiny beads and made bracelets. We all made cards for Beckett as it is his birthday on Friday. We once again read the story about “Five little monkeys” and we counted how many hands and feet they all had together. There were five monkeys, ten hands and ten feet. Then we read the story and Darren left out words which we fille din e.g. five little ………………… jumping on the …………………….Then we were asked a few  more questions; “What were the monkeys jumping on the bed with?” Miya said: “Their feet”. “Can we jump?” Jennifer said: “Yes”. “What else can we do with our feet?” We thought of stamp, walk, march, hop and skip. We tried all of these actions and sure enough we could do them. Last week we did many things with our hands so today we tried to do some of the same things with our feet. Oh Boy! This was a challenge! We did toe prints using stamp pads. We chose a stamp pad and had to press our toes onto it and then made toe prints on the pictures we did with our foot prints yesterday; we drew a picture with markers in between our toes; we picked up a small bouncy ball; we rolled play dough into a long sausage shape or a ball. In pairs , we played this little piggy went to market and counted our friends’ toes. All the things that we did with our toes were really difficult and they also felt a bit strange. Touching things with our hands is so normal however with our feet it is so hard!

Outside in the park, we are enjoying filling bottles up with water. We use the water to water the flowers and we also enjoy mixing it with sand. We will soon be planting new flowers in the garden in the park and will take care of them each day.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Christine, Nanako, Sabine, Ayaka and Goh.