Puff out the candle 'P'

Thursday 21^st June 2012. Today we came to the end of our second week of summer school and it was fun to learn about letters and their sounds. Miya was very funny and pointed out to the teachers that we hadn’t covered all of the letters in the alphabet or their sounds (26 letters / 42 sounds). We noticed on the table when we came in that there were some laminated plastic sheets with zig-zag lines, wavy lines, straight lines and curly lines on them for us to try and follow with the whiteboard markers. The teachers told us that this was good practice for when we want to try writing words. The wooden trains were also very popular this morning on the carpet and the girls wanted to dress up like princesses and play together. We did a special picnic snack today downstairs and made a big circle so that we could see all our friends faces and talk a little while we ate. After packing away our things we made another big circle and sang our ‘Good Morning’ song, ‘Where is Thumbkin”? and ‘Head and Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ songs together. We really wanted to go to the park today but the weather was not too good and so we stayed inside to do some activities. Darren asked us to close our eyes and look upwards, when we opened them we soon realized that there were hundreds of colored balls pouring down from a bag. We got so excited and wanted to play with them together with our friends. The teachers then brought out a red container and Darren then asked us to get all the balls that started with the sound ‘B’ (Blue) and put them in the container as fast as we could. We then laid down on our fronts on the floor so that we could see under the tables and furniture in case we had missed any balls. We then got up and counted to 3 while Darren swung the container and showered us with colored balls. We then collected all the balls beginning with the sound ‘r’ (red) and so on. We got so excited that we needed to sit for a while and the listen to a book titled ‘It’s Mine’. We soon realized that just like in the book we all had to share the balls and the pop up cubes so everyone had a turn. The book showed us what happens if we have trouble sharing things. We moved onto a new letter / sound today ‘P’. For the song we had to put up one finger in front of our face and pretend to blow out a candle. The song went like this: Blow out the candle on the pink pig cake, P, p, p, P,pp, Blow out the candle on the pink pig cake, P,P,P. In the book there were lots of things that started with the letter / sound ‘P’ such as: popcorn, paper, pig, pink, party etc. We then got the chance to free play with the balls and cubes on our own. The teachers had put all the cubes together in a big line which looked like a caterpillar and we could move between them all and play with the balls too. Some of us played a game where we threw the balls and tried to get them into the bucket from a short distance away too. We were very successful at this !! We then returned to the carpet to look at some pictures of things that started with ‘P’ and found many things such as pencils, pens, popcorn, peacock, parrot, pineapple, pear, peas. Next week is the start of a new theme !! Lots of love from Darren, Kana, Goh, Rachel and Miyuki.