A rainy day in our new space

Our second day went along smoothly with some of our old friends returning and having the opportunity to see the new classrooms. We love walking into the room and seeing the interesting things all around and are looking forward to making things for the walls during activity time. This week is really a time for us to readjust to being back at school and find our way in our classrooms. While we have plans for this month, our teachers are letting us also have time to enjoy being in our new surroundings. We have been singing and talking about our themes which are an extension from the ones we started last month. We are doing some activities as well. We are going to be welcoming Clodia and Beckett’s grandma Jackie and grandpa Kevan next week and they will be adding to our themes that we started towards the end of last term. We are looking forward to welcoming them to the new Ohana when they arrive next week.

The rainy day always makes us and our teachers be more creative, as we cannot go to the park. Our multi-purpose room is a great place when the weather is like it is today and the children downstairs spent the latter part of the morning there. They were amazed at the climbing wall and even without the teachers telling them what to do, they knew that they had to hold on the grips with their hands and rest their feet on the lower ones. Tokutaro and Lily were able to lift their bodies up and then come down onto the lovely thick soft green mats.

The rest of us were playing inside the cubes with the different coloured balls, throwing them out, filling them up again and then also crawling inside the tunnel. Our teachers could see what a great space this is for rainy days and so many other things…..

 Downstairs we spoke about our magnet board with our names on. At the top of the magnet board it says “I am here today” and our job each morning is to look for our name and put it on the right side of the boards underneath the words “I am here today”. We also have numbers on the board and today we counted them all sequentially and then counted how many children there were at school and we counted six; so one of us took number six and placed it on the board with our names. During library time we read a book called “Bird Calls”. It has different birds hidden behind screens and when you pull the tag, you can see the bird clearly as the screens open up. There is also a corresponding button that you push and you can hear the many sounds that birds make. Afterwards, we all made our own unique bird sounds. We did a great sorting and fine motor activity at the table too. We chose a bowl and had to look for the chain links that were the same colour as our bowl. Then we tried to link them together and make a necklace. We wore them and then took them off and separated the links once again.

Upstairs we welcomed back Sofia and Margo and had a new friend for this week, whose name is Millie. We were also happy to welcome Ava to our class from this term. Our story today was called “Henry and the Buccaneer Bunnies” and it gave us lots of ideas on how to use books to help us. During circle time, the idea that we came up with was to build a pirate ship, but how were we going to do this? Darren found a large box of wooden shapes which we wanted to use. We looked at pictures of pirate ships paying attention to the shape of the bow, the windows etc. We chose different shaped blocks and designed our own ships on the tables. We were really excited by our creations and asked if we can glue them; which we will do tomorrow.

 We did another exciting thing today with pet bottles and coloured paddle pop sticks. We filled a container with water and then we cut out a boat from the pet bottles and had one blue one and one red one. The paddle pop sticks were the mast of the ships. We had turns, two at a time to blow the “boats” across from one side to the other. You had to use a lot of wind power from inside of your body to get the boats across the water. It was such fun!

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