2012 is flying by and we are getting so big

The sun was shining so brightly today that we could almost feel spring in the air. Shelley saw a photo of a cherry blossom from somewhere in Japan so hopefully the weather will become warmer soon and we can take off a few of our layers! We sometimes do activities at the table during our free play time on the mat. This gives us all the opportunity to choose floor or mat play when we arrive at school. At the tables we had bead threading, shape punching and play dough. We are developing really good eye-hand co-ordination and even though some of us are little, we can thread really small beads. When Shelley was in Australia, she bought some supplies for the school and one of the things was special coloured “spaghetti string” for threading. We have so many colours to choose from e.g. green, pink, black, purple, yellow, green, white, red, orange and brown. It is shiny and a bit stretchy and we could choose the colour that we wanted to use. We made bracelets.

You can see from the photos that we concentrate really carefully as we are threading the beads onto the string. Our eyes are looking, our hands are working and sometimes our mouths move too! Some of us played with play dough which is also good for eye-hand co-ordination. Whenever we are playing with toys, we use both our eyes and hands together to either build, read books, do puzzles etc.

We develop these skills every day at school in almost everything that we do. At the same time, we build our small and large muscles so that we can do things without asking our teachers to do them for us e.g. open our lunch boxes, unscrew the lid of a container etc. Our teachers watch us with pride each day as they see our development in these and all areas.

When we have story time at school, very often we read the same stories. We love hearing them over and over again as this helps us remember them for when we read them on our own during library time. Today we read “Brown Bear, What do you see?” Some of us are already able to read together with our teachers as we know what words come next.

Yesterday when Shelley and Goh san were getting us ready to go to the park, Marie took a photo of us as it takes so much time to do this. We have to go to the toilet; take off our shoes; put on our jackets; put on our T-shirts; put on our outdoor shoes and our teachers have to do the same. This can sometimes take about 20 minutes. Today Kana did music with us and while she was with us, Shelley and Sabine helped two children at a time to prepare for outside. When they had their jackets and T-shirts on, they could do music and two more children went to get ready. This worked really well and we had fun dancing and singing to our favourite songs. Thanks for a great last day of January 2012. See you tomorrow, in February!

Love Shelley, Darren, Kana, and Sabine