Oh, its a Guffy Monster!

Dear Flowers Class mommies and daddies,

We had lots of fun this morning and did two new activities on the main tables. There were some big wooden bats called ‘Hagoita’ on some newspaper with many colored items around them. It turns out that the ‘Hagoita’’ are bats used to play a traditional Japanese game a little like badminton. The bats were a long time ago highly decorated and used with a wooden ball with feathers sticking out of it. Today we were going to decorate our very own hagoita using some very brightly colored vegetable dye with droppers and brushes. We brushed on the vegetable dye very carefully and they look very pretty already. We could also use colored paint with rollers too but we decided not to use this until later. Also on the same table we worked with Pooja again adding searching for magazine or newspaper cuttings to add to our phonics books.  We found quite a lot and glued them onto the colored paper together. In the carpet area there were many toys out for us to play with including the wooden puzzle toys, the duplo building sets, the people figurines, the spinning tops and the farm animals. After the free play time we all got together with Pooja and played a short ball game to tell our friends all about our favorite food which the teachers wrote on the whiteboards. After eating our yummy snacks we headed for the park and were very lucky to see many firefighters getting ready for a practice drill.  They were very friendly and said hello and ‘high fived’ many of us. We could only stay a short time today at the park as we needed to do a little work on our pre-reading / phonics skills. Today we broke into 2 groups; the first group are looking at 3 letter words and had a small reading and writing exercise with the words “I can see a _ _ _. We needed to fill in the letters / sounds for the words bat and sun. The second group were working on a new sound or the letter ‘O’. We practiced writing the letters in our special ‘phonics notebooks’ and used a funny ‘Guffy Monster’ box. The Guffy Monster loves to eat letters and make the sounds that go with them. We thought of several words beginning with ‘O’ together such as octopus and orange! We will be joined by a new friend Atala from tomorrow and are looking forward to playing with her

“See you all tomorrow, have a great afternoon”!

Darren, Pooja, Pauline and all the children in Flowers Class