What a fabulous week of bear hunting

Oh boy, it was such a hot summer school day today. We decided to head off to the park earlier in the day, have snack time in the shade of the trees and then have time to play outside. Even though it was earlier in the day, it was still so hot. We have not had such a hot summer’s day yet so we are not really used to the intense heat. We had a great time and enjoyed eating snack in the park. We enjoyed looking at a bug that Hisami was holding on a small stick. We were not sure what the bug was because it had its wings spread out from its small round body. Shelley said that she thought that it looked like a ladybug and she was right. It was. Hisami let the ladybug crawl up a small stick and then it was on her arm. It walked from her arm onto Shelley’s finger and then back onto the stick. Some of us like bugs and some of us don’t. Most of us like ladybugs and we watched it until Hisami put it back into the tree.

We played in the green area and as we were leaving, we saw our friends from Buds Class arriving. They were going to have a bear hunt in the park so we asked our teachers if we could have another bear hunt in our classroom when we arrived back at school. For our bear hunt in the classroom we used Jessica’s unicorn; Jeremy’s white seal; Yurika’s mama bear and a small white bear which we borrowed yesterday from Buds Class. Our teachers really tricked us today and created two really difficult hiding places. The one was under Shelley’s T-shirt like she was having a baby and the other one, was on top of the mosquito net display that is in the classroom.

The second teddy bear was obviously hard to get so Taiyo decided to get a chair; place it underneath the net,

stand on it and try to reach the teddy bear. Unfortunately he couldn’t reach it and many of us tried, but to no avail. So off went Taiyo to stack a second chair on top of the first chair. This made the chairs higher but still none of us could reach the teddy bear. Taiyo hadn’t finished with his efforts to get the teddy bear and he took a third chair and we helped him stack it on top. Oh dear, we were still not tall enough. So we looked around the room to see if there was someone tall enough to reach the bear and we came to the conclusion that Yukhei was the tallest in the class. The height of the bear on the mosquito net, was in the position of where his eyes were. So he took it down. Shelley had another idea. She took a different soft toy and threw it up so it knocked the bear and the bear fell down.

This was an amazing time for all of us. We admired Taiyo for trying to work out how to get the bear and none of us even entertained the thought of climbing onto a chair; and then stacking more on top of one another until we could reach. Well done Taiyo!

Today is the last day of our “We’re going on a bear hunt” story theme so we all took our books and read the story together, using our interactive materials so that we could tell our families the story when we go home. We really loved the story and are so excited to be able to take home our very own book to read.

We have been doing activities to develop our fine motor skills using tweezers, together with pom poms, plastic beads, wooden beads and leaves. We tried to pick them up with the tweezers and put them into other containers. Later in the day, we used the tweezers again but this time we had wooden circular shapes and pine cones to pick up. We also used the wooden circular shapes to build towers and try to balance the shapes on top of one another. We are also enjoying using the doctor’s set and you can see from the pictures that Yurika is familiar with using the equipment because both her mum and dad are doctors.

Thanks for a fabulous week of “We’re going on a bear hunt” and have a great weekend everyone. We look forward to welcoming Shreyas back after being sick for a few days, together with our other friends.

Love from all the children in summer school.