From babies to big

We had a new friend come to school in the classroom on the second floor and his name is Shohe. He is more than two years old and even though he missed him mum and dad, we think that he had a good time. We helped him with English and when we did something, he knew exactly what to do and he copied us. Some of us sat at the small table and read our “Life Books” when we arrived at school. They were on display on the small table and we loved paging through them and looking at our friends and family. We spent a short time on the mat playing freely with toys and then we sat in a circle and sang our morning songs. We then danced and did actions to the Wiggles CD and last but not least, we put butterflies on our finger tips and moved our hands so that they looked like they were flying.

At the activity tables, we each had a piece of green paper in front of us and dishes filled with brown and black tissue paper balls, straws, green paddle pop sticks; green matchsticks; fluffy white cotton and foam shapes circles. Shelley said that we could make anything that we wanted to. We have been learning about growth and flowers and butterflies so we used the long shaped materials as the stems of flowers. Our younger friends wanted to do the same so we ended up creating a garden scene in the green paper. When they are dry, we will put them on the wall and then they will go into our portfolios.

In both classrooms we decorated hearts for Clodia as she is having a birthday party soon after we return from spring break. Upstairs we also did leaf printing using green paint and rollers. We rolled the paint over the leaves and made the shape of a leaf on it. We looked at our large group painting to see if there were any eggs but they weren’t so we looked for things to use that we thought could resemble. We chose pom poms, hole puncher scraps, white plastic beads, plastic circular counters and pasted them onto the large green painting.

During circle time we made caterpillar actions with our fingers on the floor. We looked at the first page of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” book so that we could see the egg on the leaf. Then we spoke about what other things come from an egg. We were not sure about this so we each looked at an animal magazine for children and we discovered that many animals hatch from eggs. We found a turtle, ducks, baby alligators, penguins, parrots, a crocodile, a snake, a frog. We also realized from this that some animals come out of their mummy’s bodies, just like we did when we were babies. We then looked at babies that were almost the same size as we were when we were babies. Darren made them out of paper. We held them up to our bodies and could see how much we had grown. WOW! We were amazed to see how big we were now compared to when we were born.

We read “Dear Zoo” which is about animals from the zoo becoming pets. They were much too big and scary so they had to be sent back to the zoo.

Love Shelley, Darren, Goh and Kana