A freezing cold day

It was so cold today and we still went outside to the park. Brrrrrr! We all ran around trying to keep warm, even our teachers. We chased them and they chased us so that we could all keep warm. We also went on the slide and bouncy see saw for a short while. We then went inside to our warm classroom and ate our lunch before we had a rest. Sabine came back to school to spend the whole day with us, and we were glad to welcome her back from her holiday in New Zealand. In the early part of the morning we played on the mat and spent a long time cooking in the oven and preparing food for everyone. Miya took the pegboard with the different coloured shapes and put it in the oven. She said that this was her cake that she was baking. She shared it with everyone afterwards. We asked our teachers to read some of the books that we love and so we also spent some time listening to stories. Then we all helped pack away and sat together for our morning circle time. We did actions e.g. tapping, blinking, clicking our fingers, popping our lips, tapping the floor, clapping and sleeping. Then when we “woke up” we sang our “Hello” song and once again we all sang the words to the best of our ability. We sang “Twinkle, twinkle little star” when Gento recognized the star shape in the threading container. He said “kira, kira”. We sang “Open them, shut them” and then we played a matching game. This was something that we have not done before so it was an important learning experience. We all sat in a circle with our teachers and our friends. Shelley asked us if there were any people who were wearing purple today. We saw that Miya had purple shoes and Kana had purple pants. They were matching. There were two of them so we learnt that this was a matching pair. A pair means two of something that is the same e.g. a pair of eyes, a pair of legs, a pair of scissors etc. We were then given a card and named the picture on the card. Then Shelley put matching cards on the floor. We all had to wait our turn and this took a lot of our energy and patience. Our name was called and we had to try to find the card that was a matching pair with the card in our hand. We had an octopus, an apple, an umbrella, a heart, a mountain, a helicopter, a dog and a few other ones. In total we all had three pairs which meant that we had six cards each. We all knew how to match our cards and felt really proud of this. We will play this game together with our friends who come on the other days and teach them how to match. We can match all sorts of things e.g. colours, shapes, numbers etc.

We read more stories with our friends on the mat and are in the process of making a dragon for Chinese New Year. Kana cut out eyes, ears, horns and teeth from a small cardboard box. Today we used red paint to paint the entire box. We will spend time decorating it each week until we have a wonderful dragon for our New Year celebration in ten days time. We also have some pictures of dragons on the wall at the entrance to our classroom downstairs.

Love Shelley, Darren, Sabine and Kanako