What kind of dinosaur

Our day was filled with lots of creativity, puzzle making, singing, and reading, listening, eating, cooking and of course resting. We didn’t mind at all that it was cold and rainy outside because there was so much to do in the classroom. We loved playing the game “Shelley, Shelley, what do you see?” from the Brown Bear book. When we play this game, it makes us look around our classroom to find something that our friends have not said. Most of us wanted to say “I see a dinosaur looking at me” because there are so many dinosaurs in our museum now; they are all over the classroom. Taiga, Aaila, and Alexa made their 3D dinosaurs today. They examined their dinosaur models and added a lot of detail to their creations e. g. toes, teeth, lines, nostrils etc.

We have very little space left for our dinosaur models and look forward to seeing four more friends complete their ones next week.

During the morning we did an interesting science, math and cooking lesson with Hisami. On Monday, we celebrated our friends January birthdays in our class, and some of the mums brought orange and apple juice, which we did not have a chance to drink. So Hisami, our “motainai” teacher, said how about doing something with the juice. So she bought some gelatin and today we set about making orange and apple jelly. In some countries they call it jelly and in other countries they call it jello, and it is the same thing – it is wobbly and sweet and yummy! And……..jelly rhymes with Shelley. We had to use warm water to melt the

gelatin and then we added the juice. We made so many of them and put them in the refrigerator to set. It is Friday today so we will have to wait till Monday to taste the jelly/jello at snack time. It was liquid when we poured it into the cups and maybe it will change to a solid. We will see! All of us had turns to do jobs like pour the juice in a jug; say stop when the juice came all the way up to 600ml in the jug; mix the hot water and gelatin etc. You can see from the photos how busy we were and how we concentrated. We were curious about today’s “cooking” because we didn’t put anything into the oven.

We completed some really challenging puzzles today. One of them had 54 pieces and a few of them had 49 pieces. We also had a shape puzzle and tried to name the shapes. There is one called a trapezoid which we have never heard of. In fact, we looked through one of the dinosaur books and heard names of dinosaurs that

we had also never heard of e. g. elasmosaurus, hadrosaurus etc. We looked at the pictures of the brachiosaurus, the diplosocus and the plateosaurus all have really long neck, long tails and similar shaped bodies. We are not 100% sure how to differentiate them.

We are learning how to respect all of our friend’s hard work, in making their 3D dinosaurs and look at their models and do not touch them. We hope that we can go to the museum to see dinosaurs one day during the next few months, maybe as a Petals Class excursion.

We love role play and spent time in the imaginative play area with cups of tea, cookies etc, chatting to our friends. We also talk on our mobile phones and acting out situations in the imaginative play area is an eye opener for our teachers.

Thanks for another fun week in Petals Class, and have a great weekend.

Love always the children in Petals Class.