Don't step on the crack
Today Sui shouted “Monday” when Shelley asked if any of us knew what day it was. We were all so surprised as we hadn’t yet sung our days of the week song! Well done Sui! Today started off raining and cold and it ended up sunny and windy. We have spoken before about doing our “Today is…..” chart twice a day as the weather can change so easily from the morning to the afternoon. We did our chart today and because Sui guessed the day of the week, she put Monday in its place; Finn was so quick with the answer for the weather, which was rainy, so he found the picture and Nico helped find the three and the zero for the date. It is almost the end of May and we will soon finish school and it will be the middle of the year 2011.
Jou kun came again this morning and he cried for his mummy and in between he sat and did activities with us. Darren taught him to say “shhhhh” to help him quieten down when he feels sad. He did this many times during the morning and he is slowly getting used to our routine and doing the things that we do in class. He fell asleep while he was playing with the play dough and when Shelley woke him up, he loved watching the green water in the bottles. It makes a fountain and we all had turns to flip the bottle over so that we could see the fountain many times. Jou kun enjoyed playing with the cars and trucks and he helped pack away just before we had snack time.
Sui chan is very creative and she makes up games with many of our materials and equipment. Today we had a number activity at the table and we were using the tops of old markers. She decided to make them into fingers which she put on the end of the fingers on one hand. The number activity involved matching and planning. We had two containers; one had cards in with the number symbols on one side and a pictorial representation on the other side e.g. four stars. The second container had cards with sums on them. There were two coloures dots, a plus sign and five smily faces; two dolphins, a plus sign and one heart. We had the container with coloured tops and other empty containers. We could chose whichever card we wanted and then we set about matching and planning. When we were finished with one card we placed it in the container with the coloured tops and chose another one. We each had about three or four turns and were successful with all the cards. We also had an opportunity to make a puzzle of our choice alone or together with our teachers. Sui chose a box with small puzzles of building machines; Finn chose a large dinosaur puzzle and Nico chose the number puzzle. 
At the play dough table we had some cute little plastic coloured toothpicks with a round part on the top of them. Sui made one of hers into candy and Nico practiced his cutting skills here. It was fun to use a pair of scissors and cut play dough as you can always be successful. The play dough is soft and cuts really easily. Finn also did this with his play dough. We all learnt how to roll sausages with the play dough. We learnt how to use both of our hands, while putting a little pressure to the play dough when we roll it.
Our story was called “Don’t step on the crack”. It was really funny mostly because the illustrations were full of character and quite real. In the story they pretend that if you stand on a crack in the pavement/sidewalk, something funny will happen. We don’t think that this is true…but we will be careful when we are walking and see cracks! Won’t you do the same?
We did exercises twice during the morning and listened really carefully to the CD. It gave us instructions to move our bodies and then we had to clap a rhythm. We had to walk, do star jumps, run, tap our knees, blink our eyes, roll our heads, turn around etc. We also lay on the mat, and Shelley told us a story and then our teachers massaged us….it felt so good!
Love Shelley and Darren