The Dinosaur Train

Hello Monday! Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Buds class is ready again for a new exploration today. Our theme for this week is all about “Fabulous Fossils”. We are going to talk about dinosaurs and old artifacts. Yurika came early today with a beautiful smile. After doing her morning jobs, she went straight to our activity table and found the dinosaur and island diorama. We noticed that she’s becoming more and more curious about the things around Buds class. She likes to explore and discover how she plays with each toy. And then, she will try to get very creative and use the toys for some other purposes. For example, she likes to get the fire engine and use it as a container for food and so on. We are also very happy to say the Sofia is back again. We surely know that she enjoyed her vacation in Vancouver. Kaia was so excited when she saw Sofia that she instantly approached her and they played together with the big dinosaur puzzle on the second activity table.  Charles also came with a joyful face and he’s always ready to learn more about our class. He likes to observe his teachers and friends and then soon will join in our special activities.             For our art, we saw some junk materials like used bottles, tissue boxes and some juice carton boxes too. Our teachers helped us to connect these materials together to make a dinosaur. We recognized the head, body and legs. However, we saw something long at the back of the dinosaur. And we found out that it was a tail. Kaia and Yurika kept on repeating the word and they said that their tails were very long. And they were indeed long.  Sofia chose to have a green dinosaur and Yurika picked yellow and red. It was so amazing because we were able to paint on the skin. Yurika said that her dinosaur looked really funny and we all giggled a bit with her comment.

            In our circle time, we sang our morning songs, danced around and moved our bodies gracefully. We learned that dinosaurs had tails and we all pretended to have our own tails too. We got some dancing scarves from the drawers and our teachers helped us out to put them on. We chose the color we liked and put the scarves behind us. Now, we all have our beautiful tails. Then, we sang the song “Shake your tail” to the tune of Shake your sillies out. It was so much fun when we turned around and around and then stopped. We all looked in the mirror to see how fabulous our tails were. Rei and Yurika couldn’t stop dancing and shaking their bodies. They were so proud to show everyone how graceful they were in class. After our short dance performance, we sat down and listened to John Steven Gurney’s Dinosaur Train. First, our teachers took out some train tracks and trains. And then, we got some dinosaur plastic toys from Flowers class. We counted the trains and dinosaurs. The trains got three carriers and our dinosaurs were four. Ooppss…we’re missing one more train. So, we picked up one. Then, we listened with all ears and found out the Jesse (the boy from the book) was just dreaming about the journey that he had with the dinosaurs. Oh, how he loves and adores them so much.

Finally, we went upstairs for our water/pool play. It was always fantastic. Ivory couldn’t stop playing and she’s very glad to be here once with Buds class. Thank you so much for the wonderful day and see you all again tomorrow!

Lots of love,

John, Nanako and Toshiki