Michaela's Show and Tell
We spent a long time in our classroom doing our final preparations for tomorrows Mother’s Day breakfast as well as practicing some skills. We loved doing the games with our teachers, in preparation for the Parent/Teacher conferences next week. We walked on a line placing one foot in front of the other, like a balance beam; we caught a ball and threw it back; we stopped the
ball with our foot and then kicked it back; we hopped from one end of the room and we skipped around the room.
We have been using the magnifying glasses a lot in our classroom. We actually like to take it with us to other parts of our classroom e. g. we used it in the dress up
corner the other day. We are amazed when we look through them to see how huge everything is. You can see how big our eyes and noses are. We noticed that while we were away for the four days of Golden Week, our caterpillar died. We have had a dead bee in our classroom on our display area for a while, and it didn’t seem to bother us, that it was no longer there. We gave it a few fresh leaves on Friday but maybe it needed
more food while we were away.
During the morning we continually heard our CD and sang to the songs, intermittently. Every now and then our teachers hear our voices singing while we are doing activities. Today Michaela completed her Mother’s Day card and William L completed his “koinobori”. William L had to cut out many different sized circles for the eyes of his “koinobori”. He used pink for the biggest circles and black for the smallest ones. He worked out how to paste them on
top of one another We already put some photos from our Taiko workshop in our workbook/portfolios and since the school year is coming to an end, we are trying to complete all the things that we need to. Some of our workbooks have only a few pages left and we are going to add our bee collages and some photos of us doing activities during the year.
We decorated our tables for the Mother’s Day breakfast and decided that we wanted to draw on them. Our teachers asked us what we
wanted to do on the cloths and this is what we chose. We made many different pictures and our teachers drew together with us. You will see when you come for breakfast tomorrow morning, all the pictures that we drew on the black, white and red paper. We also spent a lot of time doing puzzles. Some of us were able to do 49 piece puzzles all by ourselves. Our teachers often sit with us when we do puzzles but this time, they wanted us to do them by ourselves. Some of us still needed our teachers to guide us while we were working. They teach us to first make the frame of the puzzle i. e. the outline and then do the middle pieces.
We all managed to do at least a 24 piece puzzle. Some of us can even do 100
piece ones. Shelley always tells us that if we can do puzzles well, this is a wonderful skill to have as it is one of the steps to master before learning to read. Letters and sounds in words are just like the pieces of a puzzle. When you put them together, they create a word just like when you put pieces of a puzzle together, they create a picture.
We have also been looking at number symbols to see if we can recognize them; we have been counting objects and we have been
looking at letters of the alphabet to see if we know their names and/or sounds. Today in our circle time, when we were doing our calendar we played a game where we learnt about the concepts before and after, in connection with numbers. We knew that yesterday was the 6th May so today is the 7th May, because seven comes after six. Shelley laid out numbers from one to three to start. She asked us: “What number is the first number?” and then she asked us: “What number is the last number?” Then, “What number is in the middle?” So when she asked us: “What number comes before three?” we knew that it was two. And when she asked us: “What number comes after one?” we knew that it was two. We then added all the numbers from one to seven and played a game with them. Our teachers are also encouraging us to put our hands up when we know the answers, rather than shout out the answer, which is sometimes correct and sometimes incorrect; so that all of our friends have a turn.
Hisami is so good at making things and we helped her add the finishing touches to our Mothers Day banner. She made all of the letters that say “Happy Mother’s Day” and we put stickers inside the letters to make the same shape as the letters. When you come to school tomorrow, please look up and you will see it hanging across the room.
We want to remind our mums that our Mother’s Day breakfast commences at drop off time. So, as soon as we arrive at school, we can sit together and start to eat breakfast. Yummmmmmm!
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel