A christmas tree in our classroom

Today we had an enchanting welcome into our classroom. If you remember from yesterday’s journal, our teachers were looking for a ‘provocation’ to encourage us to come to the activity table, rather than play on the carpet. Even though they know that at our age, imaginative play including role play is a huge part of our play, learning and development, working at the activity tables is also an important part of our schedule each day. So what was the ‘provocation’ going to be? We could never have imagined it. It was a Christmas tree with sparkling lights and trinkets hanging from it. When we walked into the room, the lights were off and we could just see the magical tree in the middle of our activity table. The lights changed from blue, to red, to turquoise, to pink, to gold, to green and back again. There are little charms hanging from the tree branches. What was on the table for us to do, you may be asking? We each had a pencil, a piece of coloured paper and in the containers were glue, sparkly sprinkles, sparkly shapes, shiny shapes and pieces of paper in different shapes. We drew pictures with the pencils and then pasted the collage materials of our choice onto the paper. We spent some time looking at the tree while we were working and we told Liezel what we had made so that people can look at our work with a different eye. Sometimes when we create things, people may think that we are scribbling but actually we are not. We are enjoying the freedom to just create and experiment with shapes, colours etc. Some of us of course are more directed and can plan but many of us just work from our instinct…..like baby animals. We had the tree in our classroom all day long. We wonder what they will put in the classroom tomorrow as a ‘provocation’. It is fun not to know what will be waiting for us each day. Hisami continued working with us to make Santa using origami paper. We also worked at the office this morning and did some drawings.

In our first circle time this morning, we looked at our calendar and arranged the day, date and weather. Then we read a story called “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish”. It is a book filled with silly rhymes with words that don’t really mean anything but make listening to it, quite musical and funny and reading it, quite challenging. Shelley said that the rhymes were tough to read. Michaela told us that fish cannot have legs or drive a car, which is what was happening in the book. She said that fish have a tail but no legs. Michaela: “Fish need water. They just swim”. Then we stayed with the theme of silly words and rhymes and Shelley sang “Banana fana fo fana” and we listened carefully to when our names came up. The song goes like this:

“Banana fana fo fana, me mi mo mana, banana

Michaela, Michaela, bo bichaela,

Banana fana fo fichaela, me mi mo Michaela, Michaela”.

You also get your tongue tied when singing this song.

Our imagination is endless and to have the opportunity to express this each day is a real gift that our teachers give us. Today Hisami was the patient and we had to feed her as she wasn’t well. You can see us helping her eat and then we needed to cover her so that she was warm. We think that we gave her good treatment and she recovered quite quickly. You can see Dr. Lilian Campbell checking whether she had a fever. Being a doctor seems quite a responsibility and we are not sure if this is the profession that we would choose when we are older.

In our library, we had a lot of books so our teachers put some of them away and now we have our Life Books to read, which we love as well as our really large books. Giorgia and Mika worked on a 100 piece puzzle this morning and they needed one of our teachers to sit with them because 100 pieces is soooooo much. The picture was of Bambi and the chipmunks in the forest. There is also a skunk in the picture which we said was a smelly animal. They completed the whole thing after spending a long time working at the table.

We have almost completed our workbooks/portfolios for this term. Every day some of us have a chance to tell our teachers a story about something that we drew or created. At the moment we are focusing on our seasonal festive collages that we made earlier in the week. We think that with our explanations, our families will be able to understand what we created.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel