A fun Friday

We had many activities to do during school today and spent a lot of the time at the tables, working and learning, with our friends and teachers. After our free play time and packing away time, we all sat together reading books. This is our library time and we particularly like reading the small books on our rotating shelf. Yesterday we read the story “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” and today we read a similar one called “Baby bear, baby bear, what do you see?” The baby bear saw unusual animals like a flying squirrel, a striped skunk, a blue heron, a prairie dog and more. We learnt these animals names for the first time today and we remembered how to read this story as it is almost the same as the “Brown bear” one. Afterwards, we sat in a circle and played a game called “Copy Cat”. We sang and when Shelley said: “Now me” we watched and listened to her and when she said: “Now you”, we did the same things as she did. We did a number of different actions and made funny sounds with our mouths, lips and tongues. We then spoke about an echo which is somehow linked here. We thought about rain and the big boom of thunder that you sometimes here when there is a storm. Then we sang an echo song called “I hear thunder”. At our age we really enjoy copying and being an “echo” and our teachers always say how careful they and other adults must be because we hear and copy almost everything that they say and do! After KIDFIT, we came back upstairs and started to do our table activities. At the one table we put on our art smocks and did stamping with paint on a piece of white paper. The stamps we used were of a flower, grass, butterfly, snake, snail, ladybug and leaf. At the second activity table, we used coloured tape and scissors. We had to pull the tape, attach the edge to the table and use a pair of scissors to cut a strip of whatever colour or size we wanted. Some of our friends are learning how to paste things that are sticky on one side as the sticky side gets stuck to your fingers. We all had fun doing this and many of us managed to cut the tape all by ourselves. We will use these as the leaves for our ‘Friendship Tree’ as our teachers feel that they are our work and will have some of our own individuality on them. They will help us cut out the leaf shapes next week.We absolutely love doing puzzles downstairs and every day we ask for new ones and more difficult ones to do. Today we did a “Maisy” the mouse one with numbers and did it as a team, completing it together. Co-operative games like this one can be quite challenging as we often are in a competitive frame of mind. Our teachers are encouraging us to understand that the most important thing when we are doing something is that we have fun and enjoy ourselves. Upstairs most of our work is a ‘work in progress’ and today we went to the table to complete our pirate ships. We used markers, wooden scraps of blocks, paper tape, vinyl tape and coloured foam and fabric. We will take them home today. We played a phonics game using the magnetic letters and magnet boards which are attached to the doors of our storage closets. We sat on chairs that were arranged in a semi circle facing two of the white boards. One of the white boards had the lower case letters on it. We had to look at different pictures and try to find the beginning sound of the objects in the pictures. There are more than one of each letter so with two teams, each team was able to find the correct letters. Nico and Ava had ‘a’ for apple; Margo and Miya had ‘s’ for scissors; FJ and Sophie had ‘t’ for tiger; Emily and Sofia had ‘i’ for ice cream and Sean and Beckett had ‘p’ for parrot. The next task was a little more challenging even though it was a basic matching game using letters. We had to look for all of the letters that made up the words that we were given and make the same word that was on our card. We did a great job and managed to complete the words, matching all of the letters successfully. Sometimes our friends helped us if we were not sure which letters to take. Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.