Shaving cream, birds and hearts

Our school is having a little “make-over” at the moment in preparation for the party on Friday night. Now we have no tables in our classrooms so all of our activities for the rest of the week are going to be floor activities. We will even have snack and lunch in picnic style till the end of the week.

Our day started with lots of things laid out on our tables downstairs. We had photos to cut out of ourselves and our classmates; we had Wikistix which are the thin waxed sticks which we mold into different shapes; we had hearts (of course) as we are come to the end of our “heart making” activities; we had shaving cream and we had all the things that we love to do in free play as well. We spent most of free play time dressing up, negotiating with our friends and trying to find our way out of a few minor conflict situations. This is actually a wonderful time for us all as we spend time socializing and getting into the rhythm of our day at school. Today we had a few minor problems that our teachers observed us in and they waited and watched as we got through our difficulties fairly easily. They are trying to encourage us to use our words and express our needs rather than cry or shout at each other.

 We had a short play in the park as we needed to get back to school by 11am. Once we had completed all of our routines like washing hands, changing our T-shirts and changing our shoes, we sat together on the mat and practiced singing some of the songs that we are singing next week for our mums and dads. We sang a canons with “Twinkle, twinkle little star” and “ABC song”; then we sang some echo songs like “I hear thunder” and “I am special” and then we sang some of our all time favourite songs e.g. “Here is the beehive”; “Wake up it’s a lovely day”; “Isn’t it funny that a bear likes honey”; “There was a farmer had a dog”. We love singing songs with letters of the alphabet in them and often can be heard singing “Tokutaro, Tokutaro, t, t, t” or “Lily, Lily, l, l, l”. We read “Hattie and the Fox” again this morning so that all of our friends could enjoy it. Those of us who had read it the previous day, enjoyed remembering many of the funny things that happened as well as the initial indifference of the animals to Hattie’s worries!

Upstairs we have a small class on Tuesdays and Sean had the white board with numbers all to himself. He recognized all of the numbers and then arranged them in the correct numerical order. Nico and FJ spent time making things with the construction kits, screwing the pieces together with the bolts and nuts. FJ made a model of a robot and Nico said that his was a bird. Ava decided that she wanted to play with the dinosaurs on the animal mat. She took them all out and had fun playing imaginatively with them on the floor. She actually started her day off downstairs with Lilian, her sister, in her classroom and had a great time reconnecting with her friends there, enjoying wearing the necklaces and other princess dress ups.

We are playing really beautifully with one another each day and in the park, Nico and Sean pushed each other on the swing and alternated between pushing and being pushed. On our return to school from the park, we went straight to the library area. We read “Captain Duck” and our teachers asked us questions about the book to see how much we had understood and of course, how much we had remembered, as we have read it a few times e.g. Which animals were in the boat? What did the frog do? etc.

We did the “p” sound in our literacy and phonics lesson. We thought of things that start with “p” like paper, parrot, popcorn, present, pink, purple, pig, pop, party …….. At the activity table we drew our favourite birds on white boards and then we each took a piece of soft laminate and with a fantastic selection of collage materials, we made birds on the soft laminate. We used feathers, foam shapes, cloth, plastic sheet, sparkly shapes etc.

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