The Five Senses

It was a great day to play in the park with cooler temperatures and no hot sun, shining down to burn our beautiful soft skin. We had fun with the wagon and spent time sliding on the small yellow slide. Ava enjoyed taking the wagon up the steps and then letting it slide down on its own. The only difficulty was that sometimes people walked past, and they could get injured if the wagon crashed into them. We also ran around getting fit for Sports Day next Monday.

Downstairs we focused on a few things regarding our theme that includes the Senses. Darren very kindly found a book about the Five Senses and we read it during library and story time. Before we read it we sang our “What are my eyes for?” song. We learnt new words related to our senses e.g. sight, sound, hearing, touch and taste. The book only covers five senses and Shelley said that she thinks that there is another sense that they didn’t mention. It is the sense that we have when we use our muscles and is called the kinaesthetic sense. There is also a sixth sense which may be the seventh sense……..this is the sense you have deep inside of you when something is going to happen. It is the sense that is sometimes hard for people to understand.

In our circle time, we spoke about numbers and counted how many children there were at school today. We counted six children. Then we counted the boys and girls separately and sang the song “If you are a boy, stand up” and then “If you are a boy, sit down” and we did the same for the girls. We discovered that there was the same number of boys as there were of girls, in our class today. We had three boys and three girls; and altogether this made six.

   We experimented with white boards at the one activity table today. We were amazed that you can draw and then wipe the picture away. We sat and drew on the board for a while and then Shelley came to the table and we spoke about different things and she drew pictures for us. Yesterday, Tokutaro told us that he was scared of a crab. So Shelley drew a picture of a crab and we told her that it lives in the ocean. She drew rocks and then she covered it with a cloth and we wondered where the crab was. It was under the cloth. We did a small literacy lesson with the white board. We spoke about the sound of the letter “s”. She drew some pictures on the board that were related to the sound e.g. snake, sausage, strawberry, sorry and sun. We sang the song “Good morning Mr. Sun” and each time we changed its face. We made it have a smiling face, angry face, sleepy face, surprised face, sad face and sick face.

Upstairs we had a selection of books on the table that had pictures of animals in them. We looked at them and then some of us started to make models of them out of plasticine. Following on from this, at the activity table, we chose plastic animals and grouped them into those with four legs, those with two legs, those with arms and those with no arms at all. We chose one animal with four legs, from the group and looked carefully at the shape of the body, the colour, the size of the animals body in relation to its head and neck etc. Nico drew an elephant; Miya drew a gazelle; Shoko drew a giraffe; Nicholas drew a lion; FJ drew a tiger. We chose the right colours and made really detailed observations of our animals.

   We read a strange story called “There’s a hair in my dirt” which introduced us to the expression “the food chain”. We thought about the smallest creature that we knew; Shoko answered that the ones she knew are called ants. We then guessed which creatures eat ants. Nicholas said that he thought spiders eat ants; Miya thought that spiders eat mosquitoes; Shoko thought that birds eat ants and Nicholas had another thought and said that he thought bats eat mosquitoes.

Upstairs we played with the balls in the park, throwing and catching and Nicholas and Nico took good care of our garden and watered  the flowers with care.  We had a wonderful day at school!

Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh and Christine.