Welcome new friends

We were so happy to welcome our friends Miles and Owen who came to spend part of the morning with us, because they will join Petals Class from January 2017. They came to play with us during free play time and stayed with us until after park time. We loved having them with us and we look forward to seeing them again maybe next week for another day in Petals Class. Thanks for coming to our class Owen and Miles.

We continued making our Christmas trees out of strips of paper. Today Shelley decided to go from the top down rather than the bottom up, as she did yesterday. So first we looked for the smallest shape and then a bigger one, and a bigger one until we had used up all of the strips. The last shapes was a brown square for the pot. It was interesting because when she asked us to find the shapes, she used words like “the next smallest” and we understood straight away. When she asked us to find the one that was just a little bit smaller than the one that we had pasted into our books, we didn’t know which one to choose. So, she went back to using “grammatically incorrect” words. She asked us to find the “next smallest” and “next biggest” and once again we knew exactly what she wanted us to do. We had so much fun pasting the strips, chatting and then adding stickers to the “branches” of our Christmas trees. We have a few more friends who still need to do theirs. By the end of the week we will all have completed ours. Our teachers have put their comments inside our books so that they are all up to date before we head off for our Christmas holidays at the end of next week.

   We sat together in the library area and sang “There are seven days in a week”; and we changed the calendar. Shelley gave us a clue for the day of the week. She said that today started with the sound “w”. Meg said: “Worm”. We also thought of Whacky Wednesday, William, walk, work, wiggle, why, what and wonderful. Meg also told us that today was a cloudy day. We sang “Oh Mr. Sun” because the sun was not out today. We gave Miles and Owen the opportunity to look for the cloudy pictures and put them onto the calendar. Then we looked for number seven because today is the 7th December. When we were looking for the “cloudy” word, Shelley said that it starts with “curly c” and Charlie said: “Like Charlie” which was correct. Shelley showed us the other words that we have to describe the weather e. g. snowy, sunny, rainy, stormy etc. Each time she showed us a word, one of us recognized that the initial sound of the word was the same as one of our friends names. Snowy has the same initial sound as Scarlett and rainy has the same initial sound as Rupert. We sing many songs in between learning things each day; and when we walk to and from the park. We have been singing many new songs that are relevant at this time of year. Here are some of the songs that we have been singing: “Jingle Bells”; “Snowflakes”; “We wish you a merry Xmas”; “Santa Claus is coming to town”; “How many candles do we light”; “I am spinning like a top” and “1 little, 2 little, 3 little snowflakes”. We drew on large pieces of paper and using coloured pencils and markers. We learnt that if you draw with a marker on the same spot over and over, you make a hole in the paper. Our teachers prefer us to use coloured pencils and regular pencils when we draw, but the sense of satisfaction that we get, when we use a marker is so wonderful. When we draw with markers, we can see the results immediately whereas with coloured pencils, we have to use more pressure and sometimes it is hard to discern shapes. We will do lots more drawing at school as our teachers also want to observe our pencil grasp, the amount of pressure that we use and whether we can make specific shapes. YeonJae did some interesting shapes when she was drawing today.

 Have a great afternoon and see you tomorrow.

All the children in Petals Class.