Snakes and numbers

It was a snowy and rainy day today and we spent quality time indoors, enjoying watching the snow and learning some things about it. Downstairs, when we arrived we told our teachers that it was raining and snowing outside. We looked through the windows while we were playing and watched it change from rain to snow and then to rain again. We saw the snowflakes floating to the ground. We were wondering why they were floating and the rain was dropping. May snow is lighter than rain. Our teachers like us to think and imagine and wonder without them telling us the answers. So we spent the morning with these many thoughts.

We stood on chairs at the windows and watched the rain and then we saw that we could draw with our fingers on the window. We then noticed that our fingers were wet afterwards. Why did this happen when the rain was outside and the snow was outside too. Shelley drew a face on the window with eyes, a nose, eyebrows, a mouth, ears and hair.

During the morning we spent time playing and doing activities at the table. During this free play time, Vincent coloured his oni mask for Setsubun and Olivia decorated a heart for Vincent’s party next week. Abiya decorated her heart for Valentine’s Day. At the other large table, we played with the plastic blocks and drew pictures. Shelley also completed her heart for Vincent while Nanako and Liezel prepared something at the other small table.

 And then we had a really special morning circle time. We started off talking about New Year and how New Year was at the very beginning of January. We sang part of our song called ‘Sing along song’. We learned that there is another New Year coming and it is called Chinese New Year. We said Happy New Year in English and in Chinese. In Chinese we said “Gong Hay Fat Choy” and then we clapped it. We counted four claps when we said Happy New Year in both Chinese and English. We saw that there was a selection of plastic snakes in a bowl and one large snake puppet. We each took a snake and we showed our teachers how a snake moves while moving our snakes. Shelley asked us how we move if we want to go somewhere and Lily said: “We walk”. Then she showed us how we walk. We lay on our tummies just like a snake and slithered all the way from the carpet to the bathroom. It was quite tiring as we were pulling our bodies with our hands and pushing with our feet. Snakes don’t have any feet or hands, they just slide on their tummies; and when they eat something, they swallow it whole. When we eat something, we chew it until it is small enough and soft enough for us to swallow. W all went to the table with our long white socks and filled them with squished news paper so that they looked like snakes. We had to squeeze the paper and then push it into the sock until the sock was full and looked like a snake. White snakes are for good luck so all of our snakes are white at the moment. We chose two eyes and a forked tongue for them and now they are hanging in the classroom ready to for their transformation; only if we want to. We sang “The snake is in the grass”.

 In our circle time upstairs we threw dice and did practical number writing exercises on white boards. We each had our own whiteboard and used a white board marker to record the numbers that we had thrown on two dice. We then tried to add the numbers up and did simple addition in this way.

We played musical chairs and FJ and Yossi were the winners in this game. If you look carefully at all of us in the photograph, you can see that we were having so much fun. Our story today had an interesting title as it was called “The Great Big Little Red Train”. We were wondering how something can be big and little at the same time. Our teachers explained to us that you can be small but do big things. This is an interesting way to look at this. At the activity table we had junk art which is an extremely popular activity with all the children in our class. Nico added windows to the red steam engine that we are making as a group project and on his individual project, he added wings to his airplane. We are still enjoying the kitchen and love playing with the food, cooking for our friends and teachers.

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