Jingle Bells and dreidels
Thursday is usually the day when Pauline comes to teach us but Pooja’s daughter is sick so Shelley came down from the office to be with us. We had a fabulous time preparing for our party tomorrow and enjoying singing our Christmas and Channukah songs. Our teachers think that we are well prepared because we sing these songs often; in our classroom, on our way to the park, on our way back from the park, and even when we get up from rest time. We will do some special actions tomorrow when we sing the Channukiah song and Jingle Bells. It was so much fun doing the actions today; we can’t wait to show our families tomorrow.
We spent part of the morning making a Happy Holidays sign. Hisami is very good at using up all the bits and pieces left over from activities and other art experiences. We had many small pieces of silver, green, red and patterned paper that we used for our festive season collages, so today we used them on the sign. We had one section at the table which was the cutting section and the second section which was the pasting section. We had 13 letters of the alphabet that we pasted the shapes on. Hisami put glue inside the letters and we put the shapes onto the glue. When we put the letters together they spelled “HAPPY HOLIDAYS” in upper case letters. Hisami hung the letters up in our room for everyone to see when they come to school tomorrow.
We started playing with our new red play dough but Shelley is still not happy with it. She and Liezel tried to follow the recipe exactly as per the instructions but it is a little crumbly. Play dough can be quite temperamental! It can be soft and sticky in summer because of the humidity and it can be dry and crumbly in winter because of the dry air. We use our humidifier in our room to keep some moisture in the room but it obviously isn’t enough. We put the play dough into a plastic Ziploc bag and maybe it will get soft again.
We played together in the free play area and still love dressing up. We built a big track for the trains and continued adding tracks until they all joined together; and it was really big. We experienced some conflict because we all were pushing our trains in one direction on the same track, but it kept on ending. What were we going to do? We all had different ideas. Some of us added tracks and we also added the tunnel to the tracks. Now we could go round and round many times but we had another problem. When we all went inside the tunnel, we couldn’t get out. Some of us gave up trying to find a solution and went to play with other trains on
the other side of the tracks; but some of us managed to take our trains out of the tunnel. Rupert decided to pick up the entire tunnel and then he took his train out. Meg, also played with the trains and when she got into the tunnel and couldn’t get out, decided to make another set of train tracks to play with. There was a lot of problem solving required in this game and some of us were able to negotiate with our friends and some of us had other plans. Our teachers always like to observe us during these times as they learn a lot from and about us, in these situations.
Our singing today was all in preparation for the Xmas party tomorrow. We are looking forward to seeing some dads at the party, which is a treat; as most of the time our dads are working and don’t have time to come to our parties.
All the children in Petals Class.