Stepping stones and cushions

The weatherman couldn’t make his mind up today and confused us during the day. When we arrived at school it was rainy; during the morning it stopped and then by the time we had our nap, it was boiling outside. Unfortunately we had to cancel our planting in our garden in the park and are hoping that it will be scheduled sooner rather than later.Our morning started off with drawing and cutting at the large activity table. We absolutely loved

cutting and spent about an hour cutting small strips of paper, twirly shapes and for some of us, learning how to hold a pair of scissors and open and close it. We have some friends in our class who are really competent at using scissors and some of us who are still learning how to cut, so our teachers are presenting us all with activities that stimulate and challenge our different levels of development.

While we were cutting we had many conversations with our friends

and teachers and some of us even chatted to ourselves, which we like doing. We will paste some of the small pieces that we cut out, into our workbooks as our first cutting experience in Petals Class this year. At the same table, some of us drew our first drawing of the year. We tried to use all of the colours in our drawings; with some of us making specific shapes and some of us making many patterns. Some of us started our day on the carpet where we built towers using colorful blocks. We noticed that there was a house and a tower, near the railway tracks for our trains. This is what inspired us and we spent quite a long time, building towers and watching them tumble down and then building them up

again. Sometimes we pushed the towers over and sometimes they became unbalanced and fell by themselves.

We really love music and enjoy all of the songs that we sing during the day. We sat with Shelley and sang “There are seven days in a week” and changed the calendar; we did actions and sang “good morning” in many different languages; and then we looked at a really interesting book about our body. It has some transparent pages which made it really exciting when Shelley turned the pages. We saw our muscles, our organs, our skeleton and our skin. We also saw a baby crawling so we demonstrated to our teachers how babies crawl; we also demonstrated how you stand up when you get bigger and how you can follow instructions. We all held hands in a circle and then showed our friends and teachers all of the different things that we can do with our bodies. These are the things that we thought of: our arms can move, our eyes can blink, our bottoms can sit,

our nose can smell, our legs can stamp, our fingers can click, our knees can bend etc. We sang “Let’s all hold hands in a circle” and “Whose name is this, put on the board”. We are learning to recognize our names and some of us can do this already. We usually look for our names, put them on the board and then go and line up to wash our hands before snack time. It is a fun way to transition from one routine to the next. We played musical instruments and sang some Japanese songs today. Then we did a few exercises using the circular shaped cushions. We used them as stepping stones and walked or jumped from one to the other. Most of us were able to balance all by ourselves. The second activity that we did with the cushions was to walk around them slalom style. We hope all of our friends enjoy the lovely weather this afternoon and have fun playing outside. Love always, all the children in Petals Class.