Dash came to visit

Our teachers made an interesting observation today. Because at this time of the year, they focus on our skills and all the things that we have learnt during the year, we have not had the opportunity to really express our creativity with art, for a week or so. Of course we have done many different interesting activities but we have not had the chance to just be free, with paint and other OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

materials. So Thursday will be the start of a wonderful group art project for us all. Tomorrow we have a birthday so Thursday is the best day for us to start. Our art will be what is called today “contemporary art”; we will make, cut out, draw, create, paint, splodge, splatter until we feel happy with what we have made. Then each of us will get a part of the art work to take home, in our workbooks/portfolios. We are so looking

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forward to this, and enjoy listening to and participating in these kinds of discussions. Tomorrow we will sit and make some decisions about what we will use first. Today started off with a really fun project. We have been preparing for our End of Year Party for our parents for quite a while and today we made our headdresses. They are bee headdresses made with black and yellow collage materials. In fact, the band

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that goes around our head is black and we had a selection of yellow materials to stick on. We chose our antennae using pipe cleaners and made the cutest pom poms and eyes.

We twisted the antennae and love how they look because the pipe cleaners are sparkly. We don’t want to show you everything because we want some things to be a surprise when the actual party day is here.

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Tomorrow some of our friends, who were not at school today, will complete theirs. We played many numeracy games with our friends and teachers this morning. On the mat we had a Montessori game, with beads and number symbols. We each had a number symbol on a card that we tried to match with a strip that had all the numbers on them. Then we did an exercise where we focused on the

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concepts in between, on the side, in the middle, first and last. We are also learning about left and right and included this in the learning. Shelley asked us: “What colour do you think is the longest?” “Which one has the least amount of beads?” “Which one is in between the white one?” We love the challenge of these kinds of games and enjoy the learning experience with 3D objects.

Then we each received a numerical symbol and had to find the correct number

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of dots to match the number. Michaela had number nine so she counted nine wooden dots; Manuel had six so he counted six wooden dots etc. We all counted the correct number of dots accurately. Our teachers were amazed that they didn’t need to help us. We are learning more and more about number each day and are really developing our skills in this area.

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You are probably wondering why we have a dog inside our classroom. Well, Dash is his name and he is a Border Collie. He is Darren’s dog and he came to school to visit all the classes. It was so much fun when he was inside our classroom because we could feed him and touch him. He is very well behaved and listened to Darren and Yuko’s instructions really well. When they said “sit”, he sat down; when they said “stay” he stayed and didn’t move; when they said “go”, he ran to them.

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He is still a baby and isn’t even one year old yet. He came to the park and we played with him there too and threw the ball, which he caught in his mouth. Thanks for bringing Dash to school Darren and Yuko. We loved meeting him! At the second activity table, Taiyo completed his Mother’s Day card and we all copied shapes with Shelley. Both shapes and Shelley start with the sound “sh”.

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The shapes that we copied were a vertical line, horizontal line, a cross, a square, a circle, diagonal lines, an X, a triangle and a diamond. Some of the shapes were too hard for us to copy however we all tried and did our best. We listened to a wonderful story called “The Very Hungry Bear”. When we looked at the cover of the book, we saw a picture of a mouse and a strawberry and on the back cover there was a large shadow of a bear. We thought that the story should be called “A mouse and a strawberry”. In fact, what we learned was that it really

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was about a mouse and a strawberry because the mouse did everything in its power, so that the bear would not come. Phew!

We sang our good morning song which we have not done for a while and we also sang “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?” We all know the words well and had fun when our friends said that we had stolen the cookie from the cookie jar. Thanks for a really great day in Petals Class. Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel

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