Welcome Zachary

Another rainy day and luckily our swimming pool on the first floor didn’t overflow. We were lucky that the people who look after the building came early this morning with a big pump and they cleaned the pipes and pumped all of the water out. Now we don’t have to worry about the pool downstairs but we really want the weather to change and be sunny again. Upstairs we used our listening centre and listened to games at the table. We had to listen to sounds and then match them with a picture on our boards. If we had the corresponding sound, we covered the picture with a coloured disc. The game was called a “Sound/Visual Bingo”. This means that you had to listen and look. Nico and Sofia with some help from Beckett, put together the ball run toy on the table. They then attached some Velcro to the parts and attached the parts to the Velcro wall. They then tested it to see if the ball would roll all the way down into a container at the bottom. Ava used the magnetic letters on the white board to create her name.

  After snack time we went down to the MPR where we tried to climb on the climbing wall. FJ managed to get all the way to the top of the wall and then she jumped down onto the green mat below. We loved playing with the balls and the tunnel too. Downstairs we too had fun climbing or rather attempting to climb the climbing wall; we loved the balls and kept on throwing them out of the tent and some friends threw them back in. We loved the tunnel and enjoy climbing through and sitting inside with our friends. It is like a hiding place. The other thing which was great fun was taking the letter carpet apart. We separated all the letters and numbers and even took the middle parts out. Our teachers had to spend quite a lot of time putting them together again when we were resting as it was a big job. Next time we will help them put them back again. Library time upstairs saw us listening to the story called “The Rainbow Fish”. We think that the rainbow fish was really sensible about sharing his scales in the end. From this story we realized that it is not so important how you are on the outside but rather how you are on the inside. Kindness, caring, love and friendship are more important than beauty and things. Following on with our activity that we did yesterday blowing boats across the water, we made our own pirate ships with masts and sails. We could choose and cut any shaped sail that we wanted and then we decorated them. We added detail to our ships e.g. the front mast, the raised captain’s area at the back etc. Tomorrow we will try and see if they can float.

Downstairs we had a great time experimenting with chalk and the chalk board wall. Our teachers think that this could be the first time we have used chalk and Olivia particularly loved seeing it become powder. We coloured the entire chalkboard wall and then used our hands to ‘smoodge’ the chalk all over the boards. Our hands were a different colour when we went to wash them before lunch. On the whiteboards we had magnets which were in the shapes of letters of the alphabet. We watched how you put the magnets on the whiteboard and they stick there, just like our names on the board at the entrance to our classroom.

Today we counted ten children in the class and we welcomed our new friend Zachary who is the youngest in our class however he is almost the same size as all of us. He had a fun day with us, in particular enjoying playing with the cars and the food in the dress up corner. At the moment we are focusing on our names and the initial sounds in our names and trying to count how many children are in our class each day. Today we also welcomed a visitor from far away; it was Grandma Nancy. She is Lily’s grandma and Abby’s mama and she came all the way from Boston to spend some time with us. She chose to read a book which is about a family of ducks who wanted to cross the road on a really busy street in Boston, a long time ago. These ducks became so famous that they have even made statues of them. We love having members of our family visit us at our school and send a big thank you to Grandma Nancy for her visit today.

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