A fun rainy day

As Miya said: “It doesn’t matter that it was raining, because we had so much fun inside”! And we did! We spent the early part of the morning playing together on the mat and doing a variety of activities at the tables. We had a piece of paper that said “My Colour Book” on it. The words were written in colours that matched the words e.g. green was written in green, red was written in red, blue was written in blue etc. Our teachers let us look at the paper and see what we thought we could do with it. Some of us started to trace the letters in their matching colours. This was fun and we concentrated really well and worked slowly and carefully. Some of us have done this kind of tracing with Darren upstairs so we knew what to do. We can even recognize many of the letters which led us to do something else. Shelley took out our name cards and played a game to see whether we could recognize our own names or our friend’s names. Many of us know our own names which is great. We took our flash cards and then wrote our names on the paper. Miya was able to recognize many other letters of the alphabet.

Nico built an interesting construction with the Ampaman blocks and he had a really long and loud conversation with Kana, about going on a holiday, packing his suitcase etc. Gento likes looking through the magnifying glass with it pressed really close to his face. He was looking at all of his friends and teachers through it, this morning. There was another activity for us at the tables. It was a cutting activity with strips and lines for the younger children to cut out and shapes for the older children. The shapes were circles in different sizes, triangles, squares and rectangles. We all did an amazing job cutting out on the lines so that we could see the actual shape in the end.

We then went upstairs and extended our play all about colours into a ball game. We took out all of the coloured plastic balls, and had to find the colour that matched a colour that we were wearing. If we were wearing red, we looked for a red ball; if we were wearing blue, we looked for a blue ball etc. We threw the balls into a bucket from a certain distance. We are learning to throw underhand and did a great job. Some of us can also throw overhand which seems to be a more natural way to throw things.

We read the book “The little mouse, the red ripe strawberry and the hungry bear” and another one called “The Apple Pie tree”. We noticed that our classroom had a few small changes and quite like discovering a new area or that something has moved. It makes us observe more carefully where things are and what we can do with them. We held hands in a circle and sang ‘Ring-a-ring-of-roses”. Darren tricked us and said that we have to be careful when we sneeze really hard and he pretended that his nose fell off. We knew that it was not his nose and kept on asking him where the nose was; he then pointed to his nose. Children are too clever for their teachers! Today we realized that that are so many more things that we can do:

We can stand on our tiptoes; walk on our tiptoes; swim on the floor; hop on one leg; make a table with our bodies; make a snake with our bodies; slide our bodies along the floor just using our arms both forwards and backwards; make a diamond with our legs by touching the soles of our feet together; find a colour on the carpet and stand on it. These are a lot of things that we can do.

Love always Shelley, Darren, and Kana