Winter School Literacy and Music

Today was the first day of our ‘Literacy and Music’ Winter school program. We had a lot of fun and did lots of activities on the carpet as well as in the library and on the second floor. The children started the morning getting to know each other a little better as some of them had not met before. Sophie and Shoko started off the morning on the carpet playing with the construction blocks and eventually built a wonderful pink house together. They then moved onto the matching cards where they can learn all about matching patterns and textures. On the table we set up some blue play-dough and large capital letters which the children could easily identify as they were the first letters of their names. The object was to roll out the play-dough into long enough pieces that they could then place on the letter cards. After snack time we moved to the library where we chose a book all about letters titled ‘Alphabet Rescue’. Kaito, Yuta, Shoko, Haruka and Sophie were all able to spot the starting letters of their own names in the story as well as a few of their friend’s names. We moved to the carpet for circle time where we played a funny listening game. The children had to follow what we were saying rather than copying our actions e.g when the teachers put their hands on their heads we said “put your hands on your knees”. This way we could see who was copying us and who was listening carefully. We then introduced a sound, for today we chose the sound ‘S’ as both Shoko’s and Sophie’s names begin with this sound. We will choose another letter / sound for tomorrow. We sand the ‘snake is in the grass’ song along with doing the actions before doing a guessing the picture game. We showed them a series of photos of things beginning with ‘S’ very quickly and encouraged them to say words beginning with this sound such as “slower” or “show me slowly please”. Some examples were sunglasses, sea-horse, sandals, sand, etc. We even tried writing some letters on the small whiteboards and all of them did really well. We then headed downstairs for some wonderful games with music. We played a wonderful game where the children sat in a circle and passed a microphone around. When the music stopped, if they were holding the microphone they had to sing a song of their choosing. We then did some pretend ice skating with our friends to the music. The park was a little chilly but we soon warmed up by chasing a giant inflatable parachute ball we brought from the school. It wqs a really fun day. Thank you Kaito, Yuta, Sophie, Shoko and Haruka. Have a good afternoon, Kindest Regards, Darren and Kana