Welcome back Lily, Abby and family

We are all resting quietly on the first floor after a long and busy day. We had a great time engaged in social and dramatic play for the early part of the day and with our new necklaces and dress up clothes, we now all have the opportunity to wear something special during our play. We still like to cook in the kitchen and “eat” the wooden and plastic food. We are learning how to play co-operatively and share our things with our friends. We are also quite outspoken and we like to express our thoughts openly and honestly. We can sometimes be a bit direct and our teachers always say, that it is important to be honest however sometimes we need to think a bit longer before we say something. We think that this may apply more to our older friends in Darren and Ayaka’s class as not all of us have advanced language skills. Thinking about what we must say, is something that will come later, when we are older. We were also soooooo happy to welcome Lily back to school. It really was too long without her and she took charge of some of our games as you can see from this photo here.

Our teachers were looking through the closet today and always seem to discover treasures for us and fun things to play with. Today we had a selection of sunglasses which we wore in the classroom. We could choose the colours that we wanted to use and here we are. We completed our hearts for Allie for her birthday next month. We will be making many hearts over the next few days as we have three teachers to make for too. Sabine will celebrate her birthday before she leaves Japan, Goh san’s is soon after Sabine’s and Liezel’s is in July. In fact today is her son Jordan’s birthday and he is four years old. We want to wish her a big happy birthday for Jordan and know that she will soon celebrate all of her family’s birthdays with them when she sees them over the summer holidays.

We did an activity using pegs which we tried to attach to the sides of containers. This activity is really good for strengthening our fingers and our fine motor control. We also used some stickle bricks which attach themselves to one another really easily. We do have to exert some pressure to push them securely.

We read a story called Sparkle and Spin, which was about words and how powerful they are. We use them to express our feelings; we use them to ask questions; we use them to let people know things; we use them in so many ways. The cover of the book has beautiful sparkly stripes and when we touched them we could feel that they were bumpy. Our teachers will cover the book with soft laminate as they want to protect the cover and the book. The sparkly part will feel different then.

Upstairs so many of us arrived at school wanting to make things with junk art materials, as well as do painting.  Sofia and Miya pulled out many different materials from the junk art container and said that they were going to make gifts for their teachers. Miya and Margo wanted to paint pictures using both brushes and their fingers. It was a really productive morning making things in our class. Margo ended up painting a beautiful parakeet. Some of us noticed that we had some skis in our dress up corner. We strapped them to our feet and did some “cross country” maneuvering on them. We had to shuffle around the classroom with them.

We loved the “Fox in Socks” story and asked our teachers if we could listen to it again. We love the part about the “beetle battle”. We always laugh and enjoy the silly words in these books.

We had a great lesson learning the sound of the letter “b” today. We thought of ball, baby, blue, big, bat, bunny, beetle, butterfly and boy. We listened to the Jolly Phonics song with the words ‘Bring your bat and bring your ball…….’ and then at the activity tables, we sat together and wrote the lower case ‘b’ six times and then drew a picture of something that starts with a ‘b’.

Enjoy the lovely sunny day and welcome back Lily, Abby, Arne and Finn.

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