What colour is it?

It was a rainy day outside and a sunny day inside. We had so many things to do with our friends and teachers, we didn’t even notice the time flying by. We  started off the day playing on the mat until all of our friends had arrived. We had an earlier snack time and then went to sit on the carpet to play a game. We continued the theme of Tibetan New Year using the five large sheets of coloured paper that we played with yesterday. We had older friends with us so they helped us with our colour recognition. Shelley had the five colours hiding behind her back and she asked us to close our eyes……whoosh she put one colour on the floor and we guessed what the colour was. Then we looked around the room for things that matched the colour of the paper. We found blue things for ethe blue paper; green things for the green paper etc. Once we had found things that matched each colour, we sang our “Hello” song and then we went to the tables. We used the large coloured sheets again and this time we made them into our own Tibetan Prayer Flags. We pasted pictures of special animals onto them in specific places on the page and then drew with pencils on the coloured part of the page. In the middle there is a horse and in the corners of the page are a sea lion, a tiger, a dragon and a garuda. We hung them in the classroom and trust that they will bring us , Japan and the rest of the world ‘good luck’ in the coming year. Noa, Nico and Noah drew letters of the alphabet on their coloured sheets. All of their names start with a “n” sound. We did string painting using blue and yellow paint and we noticed that when they mixed together the colour changed to green. We will do two more colours tomorrow with our friends who come to school on a Friday; orange and purple. We traced more hands for our “work in progress” which was hanging on the wall in the classroom but it is too heavy so we will put it back along the window. Allie, Noah, Noa, and Miya traced their hands and pasted their photo in the middle of their hands. We then pasted them onto the large painting which is still a “work in progress”.

We sang and danced and had a wonderful time with musical instruments during the morning. We walked around playing to the music and when the music stopped, we ‘froze’ or ‘stopped’. We love this kind of game. We did the same to the song “freeze” which is part of the Jingle Jam CD. We read stories on the mat and then some of us went upstairs to play some other games with Darren and Kana. We rolled the large dice and counted the dots on it. We then looked at the Days of the Week on our “Today is …….” chart where each day of the week that we attend school, corresponds to a number e.g. Monday is number one; Tuesday is number two etc. There are five days that we come to school each week. We then took five animal puppets and placed them on the table. We chose a goat, pig, dog, turtle and mouse. We stood some distance away from them and threw a ball at them to see if they could catch it. Then we built a tower using plastic blocks and threw a ball at it to see if we could knock it over. We collected all of the balls afterwards and found some in the kitchen. Some of us threw them so far. We sang the “ABC” song and looked at the letters on the wall chart and were then introduced to the sound “t”. We sang the song “When I watch the tennis game” as this is the song that corresponds to the sound “t”. We looked at the pictures and identified the turtle, tulip, tennis, tennis ball, table, teddy bear. We traced the shape of the letter “t” in the air with our fingers.

Love Shelley, Darren, and Kana