Baking muffins

Today was a very special day; something nice came our way. We baked muffins with the whole school this morning. We all sat together at the table and looked at the different things that were on it. There was a big bowl, a small jug, two spoons, a packet of muffin mix, a carton of milk and a patty pan tray with colourful paper cups in it. We started off by talking about the concepts full and empty. The large bowl was empty and the small jug was empty too. Shelley showed us that the jug was empty by going around to all of us and pouring the jug on our heads. There was nothing inside so nothing happened. Then Finn poured the jug over Shelley’s head and once again, nothing came out. We looked in the large bowl and turned it upside down and saw that it too, had nothing inside. Then Noa poured the entire bag of muffin mixture into the bowl and Nico poured 100ml of milk into it. We all had a turn to mix the liquid together with the powder. We saw that there were small brown bits inside the powder and realized that these must be the chocolate chips. The muffin mix was a chocolate chip one. We ate our snack while the muffins were baking in the oven and then when they were cooked we ate them. When things come out of the oven, they are hot so we had to wait until they had cooled before we ate them. Most of us ate them and wanted another one however we only baked one per person and our teachers often say that one is enough. We read books in the library together and then Sophie, Miya, Tokuto and Eva went downstairs. Miya and Sophie completed their sweet potato creation. They needed to tear purple tissue paper, paste it onto their page and then add some photos. These are such beautiful art works.

Noa made decorations for the classroom for our Halloween party. She cut out a bat and a Jack-o-lantern and pasted shapes and eyes on them. For our counting activity today, we used spiders and did one to one correspondence with their legs. Spider’s have eight legs. We made small spiders using four pipe cleaners. We used our thumbs and index fingers and twisted the four pipe cleaners together. We bent the pipe cleaners so that they looked like spiders legs and attached them to a black plastic shape which represented the spider’s body. We glued two googly eyes onto the body.

Our story today was “The Ugly Pumpkin Book”. We made another large spider’s web on the carpet using a ball of yarn. “Simon the Spider” didn’t have a web so we thought that we would make one for him. Once the web was finished, “Simon the spider” came back and caught Oliver who he trapped inside his web, just like spiders trap insects for the food inside their real webs.

Sophie, Tokutaro, Miya and Eva had another activity table where there was a dramatic play scene. The animals which we love so much were standing in a make believe jungle. They had lots of sand around them and there was even a water hole for the hippos to swim in and water for the animals to drink. We didn’t have much time to play with it, so Shelley put it away and we will use it next week.

We sang our good morning songs and we sang our new songs as well which we will sing with our families on Monday when they come for Halloween. Our new songs are “Five little leaves” which is related to Autumn/Fall and “1 little, 2 little, 3 little pumpkins”. Have a great weekend and see you all dressed up on Monday!

Love Shelley, Darren and Kanako