Lots of fun with colours!

We hope that the weather today, the last day of February truly marks the last day of winter and that March will take us into “Spring and New Beginnings” which is the theme for our learning in the month ahead. It was cold and miserable today and we are so lucky because it doesn’t really make a difference to the fun that we have at school. It does take away outdoor play in the park and some space to get rid of excess energy and inhibitions. We balanced our day with some yoga which as always is a special part of our programme. Our yoga class today saw us doing the candle, bridge, shark, dog, snake and “do nothing doll” poses. The “do nothing doll” pose is our relaxation pose and it says this name on the card which makes it sound quite funny. We like to lie down and do nothing and relax at the beginning and the end of our yoga class.

We started off our day working at both the activity table and the mat on the floor. Some of us played with toys as we do during free play time and some of us working at the table, completing Finn’s wishes for his birthday which is on Thursday.

We had a morning circle filled with singing, actions, completing our “Today is…..” chart and consolidation of our knowledge of colours. Today we had to change the weather to rainy which was a change from all the days when it has been sunny. In fact, this past month we have only changed the chart twice. We had one cloudy day and one snowy day and the rest of the days were sunny. We then sang and did actions to “Heads and shoulders”. In this song, we play a game where each time we sing it, we omit to sing one word and replace the word with “mmmm”. We sang the song eight times and then at the very end just did “mmmm” for all of the words. We were smiling while we were singing as we had to think really carefully and remember which words we had to leave out.

Then we played a game with the puzzle that has coloured circles. Shelley gave each of us one circle; she went around the circle and asked us what colours our circle was; and when we had named the colour, we placed our circular disc onto the wooden rod which is in the middle of the puzzle.  Then we were each given another chance to choose a colour, name it and place it in the matching space on the puzzle. Shelley sang the colour song that she partly made up; it goes like this “Mrs. White go a fright, in the middle of the night, Saw a ghost eating toast, half way up the lamp post….”

The song goes through colours that have the possibility of rhyming with. One that we don’t sing is “orange” as there is no other word that rhymes with it. Shelley was so happy to see how many of us have remembered the colours that we learnt last term. We felt proud of ourselves!

At the activity tables, we did cutting and pasting and some of us spent time drawing on the white board. Shelley said that if the weather is bad again tomorrow, we will do “junk art” which is really fun. We are developing our fine motor skills doing a variety of activities and our workbooks are getting full.

We spent some time looking at books in the library and then we listened to a cute story that held our attention for a long time. It was called “Knuffle Bunny”.

We loved the illustrations which have a background of real life pictures of buildings and Trixie and her family are drawn in cartoon form. In this story, Trixie gets really distressed after she and her dad go to the Laundromat and Knuffle Bunny lands inside the washing machine. Eventually they find it and the first proper words that she says are “Knuffle Bunny”. We can all say “Knuffle Bunny” too.

Upstairs after lunch, we looked for letters to match the letters in our names by using our name cards as a guide. We could refer to the name cards and then looked for the matching letters. We looked for the letters for Quentin, Darren, Laura and Finn. We reviewed the letters s, a, t and i and were introduced to the letter “p”. We hope everyone stays warm and dry this afternoon and look forward to seeing you tomorrow for the start of a new month.

Love Shelley and Darren