Welcome Sean!

It was a great day to welcome Sean to the classroom upstairs and both upstairs and downstairs saw lots of learning and fun happening today. First we want to thank our teachers and parents for the incredible Wine Tasting event yesterday. Some of us were playing at Ohana while they were “playing” at the Wine Tasting so we could all have a good time. Our teachers will send separate information in an email with this journal, about the event.

Downstairs we had a great time playing with a box. The box over many years has been voted the greatest toy for children and we had so much fun with it. Not only did we have to work out how to get inside it, we then had to work out how to get out of it! We used it as a car, a bus, a train and many other things. In fact the box was first folded flat in the classroom and in keeping with our interest in going shopping, Nanako suggested that it be the bus stop as there were some chairs near it. So we sat on the chairs with our hand bags and mobile phones, waiting for the bus to take us shopping. Then Shelley arrived at the bus stop and said that the bus was coming and she quickly made the flattened box into a box and we all then tried to climb inside it. Tokutaro said he was the bus (driver) and the rest of us complained as we were too squashed on the “bus”. Then we came up with the ideas. It became a train and then Vincent walked around with the box shuffling his feet on the floor. The last thing that we did with the box was lie inside it as it lay on the floor. We had a great time.

 During circle time we sang our “Hello” song, we did actions like tapping our knees, bouncing our knees, blinking our eyes, closing one eye etc. Then we read the book that has poems about food in it. Jackie and Kevan, Clodia’s grandma and grandpa in England gave it to us and we are just discovering the pleasures of reading it and listening to silly rhyming poems. We then took the large basket of food and two of chose some items of food. First Allie chose lettuce and Lily chose a banana. We first sang “Peanut Butter Jelly” and then we sang another song using different sounds and tones of our voice. We sang “I like to eat bananas and lettuce”. First we sang in a normal voice; then we sang in a deep voice and then we sang in a high pitched voice. We also spoke about who the people are who live in our homes. Then we counted our fingers to see how many people there are in our homes and afterwards we lifted up the windows of the house on our wall to see who lived in that house. We decorated our spinning tops and our teachers spun them on the floor for us. Upstairs, Sean settled into the rhythm of our days so easily and he particularly loved playing with the Lego and the wooden train set during free play time. We read the book “We’re going on a bear hunt” during library time and now we almost know the entire book off by heart. When our teachers start reading a line, someone in the class can complete it for them. We know the actions that go with the words as well e.g. splish splash across the river; woosh for the snow storm; squelch squelch for the mud etc. We pretended to swim on the floor by lying on our tummies; drive a car by sitting up and using our hands; ride a bicycle by lying on the floor with our legs in the air; fly like a bird with our arms stretched out at our side etc. We sang the songs and repeated the sounds to our Jolly Phonics songs for the letters “s, a, t, i, p, n”. Some of us showed our friends how to write the letters.

 Now that we have more children in our class many of our activities take a little longer. We want everyone to have the opportunity to do them all. Because some of us come on different days of the week, we sometimes are doing activities that other children have already done. Today Marie added some paint and a snake to her hagoita. We made beautiful designs with the corkboards, shapes, nails and hammers. We really love doing activities at the tables and have learnt to use our imaginations and work independently. We were really happy to hear that our paintings were all auctioned off at the Wine Tasting yesterday. Margo’s dad put in the top bid of the day and bought our “Escherlike painting”. Jamie’s dad was having to go higher and higher as many people liked our “Jackson Pollock” look alike…..

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