Animals Month

Today we started a new theme for April; Animals. We know lots of animals and many of these were on the table this morning. There was a piece of fake green grass and on the grass there were chickens, cows, horses, pigs, ducks, geese, chickens and dogs. Alongside the animals were some sheets of white paper and some animal stencils. We used pencils to draw lots of animals with the stencils and then used the colored pencils to color them in. We will be looking further into these kinds of animals next week. We will look at which animals live on a farm and which do not. We took our time and did some great drawings for our art gallery. On the second table we saw the game ‘Snakes and Ladders’ which we played in numeracy time yesterday afternoon. It is a fun game and a very close finish with Tokutaro winning the game. We needed to count the dice dots very carefully before moving and also checked we were moving in the right direction around the board. On the carpet Sara enjoyed playing with the pyramid puzzle and together with the teachers we soon realized that we could stack the pieces to make a tower if we were careful. Sara then blew and blew until the tower collapsed. After clearing away the toys Nanako helped us with the daily calendar and then helped us with the date, the names of the days and months in Japanese too. After snack time we hurried to the park as we were worried that it may rain. We took along some colored chalk and used it to draw lots of pictures on the slide and step areas. We drew flowers, hearts, crocodiles, tigers and zebras as well as pictures of our friends. The cherry blossom was falling slowly today and we had a try at catching them before they hit the ground. In circle time we started off by reviewing the letter ‘S’ and the sound it makes. We looked at some cards that Darren showed and tried to guess from just a little bit of the picture. We managed to see scissors, sand, suitcase, sunglasses, seahorse, sandals and seashells. We also practiced our ‘sake is in the grass’ song and actions to go with the song before moving to the table to practice writing ‘S’ in our phonics books. We then drew some pictures of things that begin with S as well as writing the names of each underneath. We even thought of some words that begin with S that weren’t on the cards such as sun, soup and sausages which we found very funny. Have a great afternoon.