Shelley has a song for everything!

For the past few weeks we have mostly had the sun shining on our “Today is………………” chart however today we had cloudy. Early in the morning it was quite cold however we still went outside to play in the park; and to our surprise, it was quite warm and pleasant. We had fun sliding, playing with sand toys and kicking and chasing the ball. We always share our toys with other children and their mums give us a smile and say “thank you” in English because they know we mostly speak English. We are learning how to say “It’s a pleasure” in Japanese so that we can answer them; “do itashimashite” is the Japanese expression for “it’s a pleasure” in English. Today we sat in a different way for our morning circle time. Shelley brought the white board near to the carpet as she had some things to show us a talk about. Today was once again filled with some new fun things; even some tricky things! Usually when we try to work out which day it is today, Shelley sings a song with different tones and pitches and it is quite easy to work out the name of the day of the week. However today she decided to sing the same song but instead of changing the pitch and tone of her voice, she left the word out completely. We had to fill in the space; this was quite tough! In order to help us she first went through all of the days of the week in the correct sequential order. Then she sang the song. Still we found it hard to work it out. Then she decided to go through the initial sounds of each of the days of the week and she told us that today started with the sound “th”. Ah, then we knew what it was. It was Thursday. We sang our “Hello” song and then Shelley drew a shape on the board and asked us if we knew what it could be. Ren said that he thought is was a tunnel while James thought it could be a house. Then Shelley added the right ear and straight away some of us guessed that it was an elephant. She explained to us that everything that we see is made of a shape or a line. She also drew a rectangle and we thought it could be a house or a rocket and then the circle shape we thought could be an ice cream, a face, the sun, a snowman, an eye or a blueberry. Our names are made up of lines and curves. Finn asked Shelley to write his name on the board which she did. Then she wrote some of the other children’s names. We could see that some of the letters are made up of lines and some have curves and lines in them. She sang “If you should meet an elephant upon a summer’s day”. She has songs for almost everything that we are learning about each day. We wonder where she stores them all!

We also looked at some pictures of modern art and tried to work out what we could see in them. We saw a snake in our art work and in the other ones we saw quite a few unusual things. Our story today was also about parts of wholes. We completed reading the one called “What can you do with a tail like this?” The illustrations are of different parts of animals and we had to guess what animals the parts belong to and what they are for. Some of them we knew straight away and others were a lot more difficult to work out. We learnt that fins belong to fish, beaks belong to birds and that we also have a “tail”. Shelley said that some people say our bottoms are our tails. We laughed a lot when she said this and think it is silly to say that people have tails.

At the activity tables today we folded small pieces of paper and pasted one side onto a colourful sheet of paper. We lifted the other part up and thought that the folded parts were chairs or stairs. We each folded 20 pieces of paper and then we drew at the office table and James completed his card for Quentin. Quentin had a special activity in preparation for his party tomorrow. He decorated a crown which he will wear when his mom comes for the celebration at school. He has four candles on the crown. Thorsten was the only one who slept today and four of us stayed upstairs and continued learning about the letter “T” and the sound that it makes. We tried to think of things that start with the “T” sound and we drew pictures of things inside a large “T” on a piece of paper. We thought of tortoise, table, two, ten, teacher, tiger etc.

Love Shelley and Darren