The day after the typhoon

Today was the calm after the storm and it was a beautiful day. We welcomed Charlie to Shelley, Sabine, Nanako and Goh’s class and he eventually found his way and learnt some of the rules in our classroom. We spent a wonderful time outside in the park playing in the sunshine and enjoying being outdoors after the typhoon yesterday. We played on all of the equipment; watered the garden; sat on the swings; did exercises on the parallel bars; dug in the sandbox; ran around; drew pictures in the sand; went on the slide and swings; played with the fan water bottle and drank water. There were not so many children in the park, which then gives us more freedom to run around safely.

Downstairs, we spent time learning a little more about the senses and in particular focused on our tongues and what we do with our tongues. When we sang our song “What is my tongue for?” we answered that it was for licking. We pretended to hold an ice cream and lick it with our tongues. We also tried to touch our nose with our tongue; our left and right cheeks and our chin. It was not so easy. We sang the same song and included other parts of our bodies and what their functions are. We sang “Good morning” in many languages and did actions that were related to our feelings. We made sad faces; happy faces; angry faces; scared faces; surprised faces; sleepy faces and sick faces. We sang our “hello” song and also danced and sang to the Wiggles CD.  We will be introducing some new music to the class later this week and also start doing some activities in preparation for Sports Day. We are so excited to be having Sports Day with our parents, friends and teachers next week and trust that the weather will be good.

Upstairs, we put some cicada shells on the tables along with some snail shells. We looked through magnifying glasses and observed them very carefully. FJ, Noa and Margo looked at them for a long time and then made imaginary voices for them and started talking as if they were talking cicadas. They put them on their T-shirts and noticed that they stuck to them with their sharp claws. Noa put the snail shells to her ears to see if she could hear the waves in the ocean. Beckett, Jamie, Noa and Oliver also painted their medals with either silver or gold paint.

      In the library we read Brave Horace about a leopard who was afraid of going to a party and the food that he had to eat there e.g. popcorn and cakes. We would not be afraid to go to a party and eat popcorn and cakes. Would you? We played Chinese whispers using the word “animals”. Well today our Chinese whispers went a bit strange as the word travelled from our ears to our mouths and into our friend’s ear. It ended up being apple. We laughed! During circle time, Oliver asked: “Where have the cicadas gone?” so we looked at a short video of a cicada coming out of its shell. It was interesting for us to see this and to know that the cicada spends seven years under the ground and once it hatches it only really lives for about 2 weeks; which isn’t a very long time.

Using the animal puppets we then took one of our choice, from the lion, reindeer, shark etc. and we had an imaginary conversation about the kind of food we like to eat. The mouse liked popcorn and didn’t like meat; the lion liked meat and didn’t like cucumber.

We sang a song about birds that went like this:

“Birds fly high and bees fly low, caterpillars crawl and rivers flow

Cats meow and cows go moo, puppies bark and babies coo

So many things to see and hear, I use my eyes and I use my ears”

We sat on the floor and looked at the map of the world with animals in different places on it. We looked for an animal that we had seen and played with earlier. We saw that a lion comes from Africa; a reindeer comes from Finland; a bear comes from America and some other countries; a shark is in many parts of the ocean etc. We hope that you enjoy the rest of this lovely day and thanks for a great day at school.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh and Christine.