January 20, 2023: Happy Chinese Lunar New Year!

In celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year coming up this Sunday, we started making something in Buds class…Can you guess what it is?

Playdough + Land & Sea Creatures

On Wednesday, we made new batches of plain playdough.  Today, for one batch of playdough, we added blue food coloring and in the other, green.  K and G helped knead the playdough and enjoyed observing the color mixing in creating a marble pattern.  Once we had two kinds of playdough, it was time to play!  Other friends excitedly joined the table and what is more, we had a selection of land animal figurines and sea creature puzzle pieces which had magnets at the top!  J, G and K cut out shapes for each animal and N, N and W had so much fun trying to fish a clamshell, starfish and even a hippo! 

Rabbit ???

Last Friday, we talked about 2023 being the year of the RABBIT and some of you may be celebrating the Lunar New Year this weekend.  Moreover, we will be having our Taiko event next Wednesday. We cannot tell you what we are making but we can tell you that this activity combines everything!  As a first step, we colored lots of paper plates in red paint!  Y, J and N were particularly excited to work at this station which turned out to be more like a painting factory!

Translucent Blocks

This place was extremely popular with friends coming and going.  M spent most of her time here, discovering new ways to interact with the other friends.  When G and K were building houses - one for K’s piggy figurine, another for G’s mommy and daddy - M went straight at it to knock them down…KABOOM!  Seeing this, Y, W and N also saw the fun in building tall towers and then clashing them down…CLANK!  N, G and K were especially amused by how things looked very different and interesting when looking through the translucent blocks!  How about putting on purple hair or turning into yellow plus green faces!?  

Circle Time

After greeting each other with our Good Morning song, we played a finger game. Today we sang one of our favorites, Itsy Bitsy Spider.  Now we usually like to play the BIG spider version and the tiny spider version.  However, this morning, K suggested that we do a “mommy spider” version, making a mommy spider shape using Mr. Thumbkins and Pointer Fingers.  Then J had a very serious face on and said, “What about daddy spider?”  Of course!  He showed how to make a daddy spider using all his fingers and we all sang the “daddy spider” version too! Phew…Next time, we might be singing for all our family members : )

We took out our rhythm sticks so that we can practice making some sounds (not that we need to be told how to…) and simple rhythms.  We sang a song together that went along the tune of The Ants Go Marching, and each time, we changed the animals from ants, bunnies…and then J suggested “pandas” and K, “giraffes.” It was the teachers who were challenged how to change the lyrics each time new ideas were chipped in by our great minds!

Park Time

Luckily the weather was nice enough for us to go to the park and since we arrived earlier than other schools, we got to play a little bit by the big slide and we initiated Kiki into the super fast ride down!  When the park started getting crowded with other friends, we moved ourselves to the green area and then, Petals and even Flowers joined us!  We had a splendid time catching up with our old-time friends ♡

Thank you for another fabulous Friday!

Love,

Buds Class Children