Our incredible work of art
The beautiful sunshine welcomed all of us to school this morning and the day was filled with light and warmth. We had an interesting free play time on the mat. All of us played with the toys that we wanted to and Noah, in particular spent a long time creating the tower in the photographs below. Darren showed him how to build it and he pursued until he had used up every block from the Kapla box. Sui and Nico were curious and peeped inside it and touched it and ……….We were all wondering how long it would stay standing and we were pleased to say that it lasted for the entire free play time.
Our morning circle was very busy with us learning a new number game. We started off singing our “Hello” song and our days of the week song, “There are seven days in a week” and then we played the number game. Shelley had a few things to show us; she had cards with stars on one side and numbers on the other side and she had a container with sparkly diamond-like shapes. We all had turns to play this game. We first would count the stars; then we counted the matching number of diamond-like shapes and then we turned the card around so that everyone could see the numerical representation for each number. The cards went from one to five so these are the numbers were learnt today. Many of us know how to count more and of course we will learn more numbers during the year. Shelley says it is important for us to learn “number concept” so that we have a real understanding of numbers rather than be able to count to 100 in our memories.
After completing our “Today is …………..” chart; singing our good morning songs which included the “Numba Rhumba” up to number five we had a busy time doing activities at the tables. We forgot to mention that we sang “Everybody clapping just like me”. In this song we use many different parts of our bodies to do actions e.g. tapping our knees, blowing kisses, blinking our eyes, nodding our heads etc.
We spoke about this month being February and we looked at our Birthday Chart to see if there were any birthdays in February but there aren’t. We looked at the month before which was January and we saw that it had been Quentin’s birthday and Laura told us that it had been her birthday too and we didn’t even know about it! Boohoo! Quentin and some of his friends had earlier on in the morning stood with Shelley at the white board while she had drawn a selection of shapes. She drew a square, triangle, circle, star, car and a flower. Quentin selected the car shape and so this was one of our activities to do. He was not allowed to look as we were making a surprise for him. These were his birthday cards from us. We spent time decorating them and he sat at the drawing table, which he loves, being creative as well.
When we were all finished with our cards, we sat at the table and became even more creative. We added one more thing to our art work. We used squeeze paints and made it look like a Jackson Pollock painting of sorts. It was quite tough to squeeze the paints especially the ones that had glitter in them. Now it is truly complete.
It was such fun squeezing and smooshing the paint and making an amazing work of art. We will all have a photo of it in our workbooks at the end of the year so we will remember what we made with our friends and teachers.
Some of us had time to go to the library but most of us were too busy working at the activities and we didn’t want to stop especially painting.
In the park we are practicing our skills climbing on the more challenging climbing equipment and we ran around a lot. Noah especially loves chasing the birds and when something fell from the sky while he was chasing them, he was really surprised. He continued chasing them though. We slid down the large slide and the small yellow one which was dry today and we had a great time with our friends and teachers.
Love Shelley and Darren