Acorns falling down

Today we were very busy during the morning doing activities and pasting our work inside our workbooks/portfolios. Shelley had to meet a mum and her a little boy so she was not in the classroom during the morning. She sat with us when we did our finger prints and we had such fun using all of our fingers on the stamp pads. We put one finger at a time on the stamp pads and pushed really hard so you can see our actual prints. We looked at our fingers when we were finished and had colourful finger tips. When we washed them, we couldn’t even wash all of the ink off. We will use these finger prints on our weaving art work. Our teachers thought that they wanted to add something of us, onto the art work so our finger prints become an interesting option.

Hisami continued making “donguri” with our friends who were not at school yesterday and she did a few more activities with some of us who had not yet done them. Our teachers like us to have the opportunity to do all of the activities that they plan for us, each week. Lucinda, Mika, William B and Koh chan all did a combination of colouring, cutting and pasting. We are prolific with our art works each day and are really enjoying making different things this year.

We also did the Fairy Tale puzzles which we like doing more since we have a boundary in which to do them. On the table we have three squares made out of tape. In each square is the perfect space for us to do a puzzle as they are just the right size. When we are doing more challenging puzzles, we tend to like doing them with either a friend or near to one of our teachers. Today Alexis completed one and Koh chan too. Hisami sang the song “Donguri koro, koro” during circle time and showed us real acorns once again. The song in English goes like this:

“Acorn, acorn, acorn falling down

In a little pond, what shall we do?

A mud fish comes and up and says

“Hello little boy”

Come on, let’s play together now!

We looked at the real acorns and Hisami had created a make believe pond with a fish inside it. Each time, she dropped an acorn into the pond, we counted how many there were. We counted all the way up to ten. Then she took a few away and we counted again; each time the numbers changed and we had to recount the acorns. This was a good way of teaching us simple addition and subtraction.

You can see us counting really carefully. We used our fingers to help us count. Then we added another dimension to this game, and we had to find the correct numerical symbol and place it next to the correct number of acorns. Hmmmm, this was a little bit more difficult. Many of us know the number symbols and our friends are learning from us. Our teachers always say that children are the best teachers but we can’t understand this. How can we be teachers when we are children? Maybe when we get older, we will understand what they mean.

We changed the colour and looked at the initial letters of the words and listened to their sounds, to help us work out what today’s name was and what the weather was. We knew that two followed one so we understood second of October.

On our way back from the park, we stopped at the little nature reserve which has become really overgrown. We saw many tiny fish and a few goldfish in the pond and the beautiful “kinosukeh” tree was in full blossom. It gave off a lovely smell and we found many flowers lying on the ground, that had fallen off the tree.

Thanks for another fun day at school and see you tomorrow for full, fabulous, fantastic Friday.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.