Playing co-operatively

We continued working on our mural both down and upstairs that reflects what we saw and did when we went on our sweet potato field trip. Miyuki, Tokutaro’s mum said this morning that she has also seen bluish coloured sweet potatoes. There seem to be many colours of sweet potatoes all around the world. Today Eva, Sophie and Tokutaro made little creepy crawlies to put on the mural in our classroom. They rolled pieces of newspaper into sausages and then squeezed them with their little hands. Afterwards they chose a colour and together with Shelley, they covered them with coloured tissue paper. Kana glued wiggly eyes on them and they are on the table with our real sweet potatoes. It looks like they want to nibble them. Downstairs in our classroom we are showing signs of co-operative play which is amazing for our teachers. Today Tokutaro and Eva were playing with the pegboard from upstairs. First they engaged in parallel play where they put pegs into the holes and observed one another. Eva then put one peg on top of Tokutaro’s one. Then she gave him a peg so that he could put them inside the holes. Tokutaro then did the same thing when Sophie was making a tower with the pegs. We are really good at sharing and can learn this when we are really young. We are learning so many things each day. Today we sang our regular morning songs and then we did movement to music with a Wiggles CD. The songs we really enjoy doing movements to are “Jump like a kangaroo” and “Shake your sillies out”. The other ones we always pick up and instrument and tap the tambourine or shake the bells as we walk around smiling and singing. Our play dough activity had wild animals with it.

We had giraffes, hippos, a cheetah, elephants and a crocodile. We listened to “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” for story time and Shelley used the green worm that we made for our sweet potato mural as it looked similar to the caterpillar in the story. We watched it creep across the book and nibble so many things before it turned into a butterfly. Sophie knew that it would become a butterfly as she said: “The butterfly is coming”. We made our hands look like butterflies and we fluttered them away.

Today was our fire drill and we had to run out of our classrooms really quickly even though we were just pretending. We went down the stairs to go to the park as we did the practice at this time. We know that when there is a fire, you cannot use the elevator and have to walk down the stairs safely and as quickly as you can.

Upstairs we had a great game where we had to wear a blindfold and try to put the nose on the Jack-o-Lantern. It is quite difficult to find the right place to put the nose on, when you cannot see. In our circle time we sang “Ring a ring of roses” and we did actions and sang “This is the way we brush our teeth”, to the tune of “Here we go round the Mulberry Bush”. We included actions like ‘wash your face’, ‘put on our shirts’, ‘comb our hair’ etc. We also sat face to face with a partner on the mat holding their hands and we sang “Row your boat”.

We continued learning how to brush our teeth correctly and today we used the hour glass which is sand in a container to help us do it for longer than we normally would; when you turn the hour glass over onto the table, the sand goes down to the bottom and this takes about three minutes.  Our book for story time was called “Apples”. We learnt that apples grow on trees; what is inside an apple and what other foods we eat, that come from apples. We also learnt about a game that people play when it is Halloween called ‘apple bobbing’. You put apples into a bowl of water and you have to try to pick one up with your teeth but you cannot use your hands! Oh no, this looks a bit too difficult for us! We hope that everyone has a great weekend and thanks for a wonderful week. We look forward to seeing all of our friends who were on holiday this week, back at school again. We were so lucky as Gento kun was in the park with his mum and his sister today so we could play with him again.

Love Shelley, Darren and Kanako