Be careful of the "oni"

Be careful of the ‘oni’ in our classroom on the first floor! Actually, our ‘oni’ is not so mean even though his face looks a little bit angry. We added a body to the head that we made yesterday and had a great time crumpling newspaper and pieces of paper from magazines. We filled up some plastic bags and then covered them with red paper. We added hands to the arms; Hisami traced Marc’s hands and Shelley traced Lilian’s feet which we added to his legs. We made his tummy using a really big plastic bag which we first filled with newspaper and then red paper. His tummy is really big and we were worried that his legs would not be able to carry him, so we sat him on a chair and that is where he will be till Monday when we have the festival “Setsubun”.

 We had another activity to help us learn how to blow through a straw. We are used to sipping drinks through a straw but not really blowing through one. We each chose a straw and we had two trays filled with pom poms. Pom poms are really light and we tried to blow them to our friends and then they blew them back to us. It was quite challenging for many of us. We did some more drawings with red and gold writing materials and the red stamp. On our wall we have our Chinese New Year group art work displayed together with our 3D horse. Our “oni” is sitting next to Shelley’s desk; maybe it is protecting her from something bad…….

Upstairs, Allie and Ava started working on the wildlife puzzles which were on one of the tables. Allie worked out how to separate the pieces that form the frame and she joined them together in no time. Ava completed her 80 piece puzzle all by herself and was really proud of herself when she had finished it.

We set up the large blue background for our group “Pop Art” project. We selected a whole lot of different circular shaped objects which we used to make dots with paint. Today we used bright pink paint and had to put the painting on the balcony to dry as it is so enormous.

On the carpet we had a selection of Montessori toys to play with. Ethan and Ryan used the triangle shapes which when fitted together, making a larger triangle shape. Jennifer and Ethan practiced their counting skills using the large coloured sticks. These sticks are specifically for measuring and they used them to measure different things and count out the number of centimetres. Nanako helped Blue learn how to use the sticks too. First he arranged them on the carpet randomly and then he organised them according to size. So he put them from smallest to biggest.

We learned how to play snakes and ladders with a board, dice and counters. It was an important lesson in waiting ones turn too which sometimes we find hard  to do. We are always so excited to learn new things and do things that we already know, it is hard to hold our passion at bay. We ran out of time to fully complete the game and had a great time. We sang our “Old Macdonald” song where the words are all about the vowels in the alphabet which are a, e, i, o and u. During circle time, we reviews all the sounds that we have learnt up until now which are s, a, t, i, p, n, c, k, e, h, r and today we were introduced to the letter “m” and it’s sound. We practiced writing the letter in our notebooks and then drew a picture of something that starts with the letter “m”. We looked at flashcards to help us get some idea of things that have an “m” as their initial sound e. g. mouse, monkey, mouth, moon, mop, mat, map, mango etc. We tried to write the words that were on the flashcards too. We all sang together “The mum and dad make many meals, for their hungry children”.

  Love Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine and Maryna