Singing the “Nhumba Rhumba” song

Last night was a snowy Valentine’s Night and today the beautiful, warm sunshine came out and we were able to go and play in the park. We did have to pay attention to the slides, especially the small yellow one as it had a huge puddle of ice and water on both sides. Some of us touched the ice that was lying there and felt that it was wet and very, very cold!!! There were many puddles all over the park which the birds were using as a bath and “water hole”, and those of us wearing boots could splash in them if we wanted to. We played with the bouncing balls and the basket ball and ran around playing games which was great fun. Our morning started a little later today as some of our friends arrived late due to the train delays. We had a longer morning circle time which included number games and more songs together with lots of learning. We sang many new songs as Shelley makes songs up all the time. She is always singing and rhyming and playing games with words. After counting the days of the week on our “Today is ……..” chart, we counted the children and we discovered that there were the same numbers of children as there are days of the week. There are seven days in a week (these are the same words as our song) and there were seven children at school today. Shelley gave us each a name of a day of the week e.g. Finn was Sunday; Koyo was Monday etc. We counted all the things that we have to do each day to complete our chart and again the number seven came up so everyone had a turn to do something. Before we completed the chart, we did some exercises around the sound of the letter ‘T’. We held our hands in front of our mouths and said “t, t, t, t, t, t, t, t” many times. We all felt air coming out of our mouths and some of us said the air was hot and others said that it was cold. We then listened to the song that Shelley sings where we have to pay attention to pitch and differentiate between the words. Today is “Tuesday” and it starts with the sound “t”. Tuesday is the second day on the list and James knew which one to pick. There are two days in the week that start with a “t” but the other one is the fourth name on the list. After this exercise we spoke about whose name starts with the sound “T” and some of us knew that it was Thorsten. Shelley then showed us one finger and asked us how many fingers we could see….of course we all knew 1. So we sang “The Numba Rhumba” song. We do a movement using any parts of our body when we sing the song and then each time we work out what number comes next; how many fingers Shelley is showing us and eventually we will be able to make up our own rhymes for each number. At the moment “Number one is so much fun; number two lets tie our shoe etc”.

We love rhyming games. We revisited our discussion about what makes us sad so that Ren, Koyo, Constant and James could have their comments on the subject which we could document.

One of the activities that we did today was the same as yesterday as we wanted to give our friends who were not here, the opportunity to be a part of our art work which is now complete. They threaded beads on pipe cleaners and now we all have one of our very own on the completed art work. We also did a fun activity using plastic knives and ribbon. We cut a piece of ribbon and then learnt how to make a straight piece into a curly one. We also learnt how to split them and make the ribbons thinner. Here in these photos you can see some of us working on this project. The painting is now on the display board and we would love our families to come into the classroom to see it. Our theme on Feelings is going to continue and we are not sure where we will end up with it. Shelley says that this is the fun part of learning as we can be creative in our thoughts and express them through art in many different ways.

Our story was one where we had to imagine and wonder. It was called “Whose tail is this?” We learnt that animals have different ways of seeing, smelling, touching etc. and while our noses are on our faces, a crickets nose is on its knees. So if you tell a cricket to touch its knees it will be touching its nose as well. This is funny. We will continue reading the story tomorrow and learn more weird and wonderful things.

Love Shelley and Darren