Brrrrr.....it is so cold

The rain is raining all around, it falls on fields and trees

It rains on the umbrellas here and on the ships at sea

This is a poem that Shelley learnt when she was little and she told us that when you get older you remember things from long ago. She didn’t tell us that you forget things that happened a moment ago………..this is funny!

We spent the day indoors as it was raining and the temperature is so low. We would have all frozen into ice blocks if we had been outside. The weatherman said that it will snow later this week but we are not sure. We started off the day playing with our friends and teachers on the mat and later in the day we moved to the table and did activities. Downstairs we find it a little difficult to make a circle when we are already sitting on the mat so we stood up and held hands in a circle. We did some actions like jumping, balancing on our heels, standing on our tip toes and then we sat down in the circle. We sang a new good morning song that includes some Japanese words. All of our friends sing the first line; we sing the second line by ourselves and then everyone sings the last line. It goes like this

Hello all the children “ohiyo gozaimasu” how are you today tell us?

I’s fine thanks “arigatou”

We welcome you to our preschool class.

We looked at two colours of tissue paper. One was black and the other was yellow. Shelley started to draw a shape on the small white board which some of us said was a circle. She said that it is a round shape and it is called an oval. Then she asked us what we think it could be. Clodia said it could be a ball or an eggplant or a fish. Shelley continued to draw and made black and yellow stripes and then Clodia said that it looked like a bug. Shelley kept on drawing and then picked up a book that was called “Busy Bee”. Then we realized that it was a bee. We made a buzzing sound like a bee and sang “Here is the beehive”.

At the activity tables we used black and yellow markers and pencils, black and yellow tissue paper and black and yellow origami paper and we made pictures. We also took a toilet roll and wrapped yellow and black around it together with one of our teachers. We learnt about stripes during circle time. We looked at our clothes and saw that Clodia had stripes on her top and so did Tokutaro and Lily. Lily also had stripes on her Pepper Pig slippers. We learnt that stripes across are called horizontal stripes and one’s going up and down are called vertical stripes. We tried to draw a ‘stripe’ in between two black ones that Shelley had drawn.

It was a busy morning today filled with many new things and some packing.

Upstairs we arrived in our classroom and saw that the table had cards laid out on it. They were opposite cards. We had to try to find the opposite card and match the cards together like a puzzle. We noticed that there were some origami airplanes on the table so a few of us sat down with Ayaka and learnt how to fold the paper and make an origami airplane. We sang “Flying in the sky” which is a Wiggles song. We moved our arms as if they were wings and pretended to fly. We did something with balloons and a pump when we were sitting on the mat. We all had a turn to try to use the pump. We laughed when Nico took the ball from the pump and then he let it go. It flew all around the room. We then made hot air balloons in keeping with our theme on “Transport”. We pumped our balloons up with the air pump and then decorated them using markers. Our next activity was a big challenge; we used the balloons for this. We bounced the ball on our hands five times; we bounced it on our head; used our feet to keep the balloon from landing on the ground. We decorated yoghurt pots which became the baskets for our hot air balloons. Our teachers tied the balloons to our ‘baskets’ and they look just like real hot air balloons.

We selected a finger puppet and placed one inside our balloon and chose where we wanted ours to be placed on the ceiling.

We read two stories which were interactive. The one was called “The Wheels on the bus” and the other one was “We’re going on a bear hunt”. We hope that the weather will be warmer tomorrow but we are not sure if this will happen.

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