Numbers and Jigsaw puzzles

This morning, Sean was very interested in the numbers puzzle on the table. There were four separate kinds of puzzle pieces and he needed to put together the written number, the objects and raised fingers in order to complete the entire puzzle. He did very well with the entire puzzle and then he set to work just like his other classmates in order to decorate a picture frame. The frame is made from foam and we had a selection of sparkly shapes and shapes cut out from the punches to stick on the frame. These are gifts for Valentine’s Day for someone that we love. We are not sure what the true meaning of love is however we do know that it is something to do with things or people that we like. We like playing with our friends so maybe this means that we love our friends. We like getting hugs from our mums and dads so maybe this means that we love our mums and dads. We will talk more about love next week. We know that there is a song that says “Love is something if you give it away, it will come right back to you”.

We read “No moon, no milk” again today and in our circle time, we took the box of transport downstairs to use at the activity table while our friends from downstairs were doing KIDFIT.  Our teachers wrote our names on the work that we had done earlier. We reviewed some basic shapes e.g. square, triangle, circle, rectangle, diamond etc.

We looked at the transport in the box and decided which ones we wanted to add to our drawings. Once we had drawn them with pencils we used a variety of colour pencils to colour them in. We sang songs for the letters “n” and “i”. The song for the “n” is all about hearing an airplane and we make the “n” sound by putting our tongue on the top of our mouths. The song for the “i” sound is “Inky the mouse is my pet”. In our KIDFIT class today, we loved the obstacle course. The obstacle course has stepping stones for hopping on; a tunnel for crawling through; a rounded strip of foam to walk along like a balance beam; a hopscotch mat to hop on one foot on and then two feet right at the end and a soft mat for doing somersaults on. Some of us can do a somersault all by ourselves already. We continued learning about our heart and that it pumps blood to all parts of our body. It even pumps blood to our feet and arms, our heads and our tummies. Our heart is in our chest and it is a very important organ in our body. The love heart shape that we know and can draw is not like a heart in our body. We are trying to draw love hearts because it will soon be Valentine’s Day when lots of people declare their love for someone special.

Downstairs we played with play dough and read stories with our teachers. We also had a big challenge today; we tried to do jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles are different from our other puzzles as the pieces are smaller and you have to fit them together to create a picture. They are made from hard cardboard. The best thing about our puzzles was that they all had ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ pictures on them. They were in varying degrees of difficulty with the first one having larger pieces and only a few of them; to the fourth one that had smaller pieces and many of them. So the more pieces there were, the smaller they were. Clodia was particularly good at doing the puzzles and she ended up helping all of us to complete ours. Vincent concentrated for a long time to complete his and Tokutaro too managed to complete his. Olivia enjoyed doing half of her puzzle and then she became interested in the puzzle cubes. In the end, we were a little tired so that is when we needed help from our friends and teachers. They always observe us when we are “working” at the activity tables and saw how we worked out which piece went where; how we matched the colours and paid attention to the picture etc.

During our KIDFIT class we balanced on one leg and pretended that we were an airplane; we kicked, threw and caught our plastic footballs and we hopped, jumped, skipped and galloped. Our favourite thing is singing the “Love” song. This song is like “YMCA” which many of our parents know; except we do the actions for L, O, V and E.

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