Welcome back to school

“School’s back from summer………………….”

We were so happy to welcome back our new and old Petals class friends, families and teachers to school today. It was lovely to see everyone and it was great to be able to just slot back into our classroom schedule while showing our new friends what we do and how we do things in Petals Class. Our new friends seemed to enjoy their day and tomorrow they will get used to things even more so we can all “be on the same page”.

Our teachers commented that we had grown taller since summer; and since we are in Petals Class, we think that we are big already.

 We started off our morning engaged in free play on the carpet with Lego being one of our favourites. Some of us sat in the social and dramatic play area where we took out the food containers and emptied them to create a picnic area. We all love the phones and many of us were chatting to our mums and dads. We like to mimic things that our parents do and talking on the phone is one of our favourites. During this time, our teachers invited us to come to the activity tables so that we could work on some projects that we usually do at the beginning of each school year. The first one that we did was making our own place mats. These are a very important part of our daily lives at school. We use these placemats every day for both snack and lunch times. Our placemats are one of the first things that we use to learn how to identify our names, together with our flashcards on the magnet board; and if one of us is the “snack time leader”, we lay the table for all the children in our class, using the placemats. We used pictures of food from magazines which we cut out and pasted onto a ‘plate’ together with a fork and spoon. Our teachers laminated them to protect them and we already used them today.

The other activity which we participated in was making play dough. We looked at, felt and tasted some of the ingredients. We thought that the salt was sugar and when we tasted it, Shelley asked us if we liked it and we said: “Yes”. She wasn’t sure if we really liked the taste though! We poured the flour into a bowl and added the salt, cream of tartar and oil. Then we took some food colouring and mixed it into a jug of water. We watched the water change; the reason for this was that we asked for orange play dough and needed to mix red and yellow together. We stirred the red water and then added yellow food colouring to it. When we poured the water into the mixture, we saw that the mixture was actually orange; which was the colour that we wanted. We watched it in the microwave as it cooked and then Shelley kneaded it, when it came out and we will play with it tomorrow.

We sang our “Hello” song and learnt how to sing “My name is…………………” Our action songs were “Let’s all hold hands in a circle”, “Heads shoulders knees and toes” which we sang really slowly and then really quickly, and “Whose name is on the board”. We each had a turn to try to find our names and place them on the magnet board on the right side, to indicate that we were at school today. We listened to a story called “My World” which is written by the same person who wrote “Goodnight Moon”. Her name is Margaret Wise Brown. The words were written almost like a poem. We liked making comments when Shelley read the story to us especially because we heard the words mommy and daddy in it. It was a short day and we didn’t get a chance to go to the park. It will be the same tomorrow as we will not have lunch at school again. So maybe on Wednesday, we will have a chance to go to the park, as it will be a longer day. We really loved our first day at school and our teachers had fun with us too. We are looking forward to seeing everyone again tomorrow and welcoming some new and old friends, who didn’t attend school today.

Thanks for a fabulous start to the new school year!

Much love always, all the children in Petals Class.