The pointer finger

We welcomed some more friends back to school today and were very happy to see that everyone was smiling and happy. Some of us are in a new class and have new friends and this makes the whole experience of school rich and stimulating.

Each day when we arrive at school we have some specific activities to do at the small tables. On one of them we had a Montessori colour game where we played with coloured wooden pegs and had to match them according to their colours. It was not as simple as just matching colours because each board had four pegs graded in different shades of one colour. The light and dark ones were easy to discern but the other ones were slightly lighter or darker. We learnt the colours light blue and dark blue; light green and dark green and were able to see that both colours were green but different shades of green.

At our activity tables our friends who started school today made their placemats and some of us played at the play dough table again. This time the play dough was play dough with herbs inside it so it smelled a little like pizza. Yummmm!

When we went to the carpet for morning circle time, we all sat on the circular cushions in the library and Shelley placed our names, upside down onto the coloured buttons on our new library carpet. We spoke about the colours and once again mentioned light and dark and then we were each given a turn to find our names and show them to our friends. We sang the initial sounds of our names e. g. “Michaela, Mika m, m, m, Michaela, Mika m, m, m”. We did this with all of our names and loved finding them on the mat and then showing them to our friends.

We then took our names to the magnet board near the front door of our classroom and placed them on it. We will do our best to remember that we need to find our names every day and place them there, as a means of showing our teachers that we are ‘present’ at school.

Our snack time song was a little funny today because we changed the initial sounds of all of the words and chose to use the initial sound of Shelley’s name. So we sang “Shack shime, shoes shown shown shown etc”. Some days we will sing it with the correct sounds and on other days, we will sing all the words with one sound.

We went to the park after snack time and just as we were leaving some light drops of rain fell from the sky. We hurried back to school along the lane where some people were trimming trees in Christine’s apartment building. Lots of small branches had fallen on the laneway which we managed to avoid.

When we returned from the park, we sat together on the mat in front of the white boards. There were numbers on the white boards which many of us can recognize. We then counted out the matching number of small magnetic letters and placed them next to each numerical symbol. Vincent went to get the pointer finger and all of us had a turn to point the pointer finger at a number that our friends shouted out for us.

We loved being given a role of responsibility in this game and will play it again with our friends tomorrow. We also learnt about classification and told our teachers that 1 to 9 were numbers and the coloured shapes that we placed next to the numbers, were letters. Our teachers are really enjoying playing interesting games with us where we can respond with language and they feel inspired to do more with us each day. We love being challenged as we are growing up and have an insatiable appetite for learning.

Thanks for another great day at school and we look forward to welcoming

Miyu chan for her first day tomorrow. Stay dry in the rain, which the weatherman said is going to come later!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel