“Oh what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day……………”

These are the words from a famous song from long ago, when our teachers were little, just like we are! Today really was a beautiful day not only because the weather was sunny and warm, but because of what we did and how we were, as a group, in class. Some of us started off the day playing with the cars on the street mat and when we were finished playing, without our teachers telling us, we packed away and discovered the puzzle on the small table, which was not yet complete. Sui and Renshi decided that it was their job to do the puzzle and they set about working on it for a long time. Shelley gave Sui pieces which she needed to match in specific places and Renshi, he is a “puzzle professor”, needed no help whatsoever and he added the final touches to it. Shelley then offered to take another 100 piece one out tomorrow but they wanted a new one straight away. So together they went to the toy cupboard in the library and there on the shelf was a 100 piece puzzle with a picture of an airport on it. They started doing it and then stopped as it was circle time etc. and tomorrow they will try to complete it. Shelley particularly likes to give us puzzles as it is one of the toys that helps us understand letters and how they are put together; which leads into understanding words and ultimately reading them. This is a wonderful skill for us to develop at preschool and Shelley sometimes does 1,000 piece puzzles at home. In the picture with the puzzle, we are holding our noses because there was a skunk in the puzzle and Shelley told us that apparently they are smelly. We were having some silly fun together. In the second photo, Nico and Renshi are playing together with the “Wedgits” in the library. Sui also joined in and sat on the floor playing with the second one. When we eventually sat down for our morning circle time, we sang good morning in many different languages. The song we sing has actions as well. It is called “I’m looking to see who is clapping their hands…….”; we do many different actions and today we said good morning in French, English, Japanese, Hebrew and Norwegian. While we were on the mat, we sang “Sunday, Monday….” and we worked out that today is Wednesday. Shelley sang “Wednesday starts with ‘w’……..” and then she sang the initial sounds of all of our names as well. Today we learnt about insects and named a few different kinds of insects. Many of us don’t like insects and sometimes when we are in the park and we see an ant, we run away and scream. Shelley tells us that insects are creatures of the earth and we need to take care of them. We think that she doesn’t like all insects especially cockroaches which we don’t like either. We played a dominoes game using the insect cards. Shelley dealt the cards to us and we ended up having 5 cards each; then we had to look carefully and see if we could match our cards with the ones laid down on the mat. The insects we learnt today were bee; beetle; ant; butterfly; grasshopper; ladybug and spider! When we played this game, we sang songs about the insects e.g. “Here is the beehive”; “A, a ants on my arm”; “Incy wincy spider” and “Butterfly”.

We did origami and tracing at the activity tables. We followed the origami instructions on large pieces of paper which were made into a book. When we had made the origami, we saw that it looked like a mouth, maybe even a bird’s beak. We sang “Open them shut them” using the origami like a mouth. We have a great picture of us laughing really hard when we were singing “Open them, shut them” in the silly, upside down way. In the park, we played with water for a short while and then we played with the ball, we ran around collecting sand and we drank water. We are now taking our bottles with us to the park so that we stay hydrated all the time.

Love Shelley and Darren