All dressed up and where do I go?

We changed our routine today so that we could go outside early, eat snack in the park and play there before the park became filled with lots of children from other schools. Yesterday it became much too full while we were there and our teachers sometimes worry about being able to supervise us adequately in these situations. So at around 9.30am we packed up all of  our toys and got ready to go to the park. When we prepare to go to the park, there are many logistics involved especially with our class on the first floor; and when we have to take our snack, our bottles and picnic mats, it becomes a little bit more involved. We have a ritual before we go to the park; we sit near the front door to our classroom and take off our indoor shoes all by ourselves; we then put on sunscreen, our hats and our school T-shirts or smocks and then we go and sit on the steps outside so that we can put on our outdoor shoes. All of this takes a long time and in order to prepare things well for when we are ready to go down the stairs, our teachers get the outdoor toys and rope ready for us. Today we had an extra bag filled with our snack and bottles as well as Clodia’s book about popcorn.

When we arrived at the park, we took our shoes off to sit on the picnic mats and we listened to an abridged version of Clodia’s book called “The Popcorn Story”. Then we ate our snack and had popcorn that Clodia made at her home and she shared some with us. Once we had finished our snack, we could play in the park. We made another river today and filled it with water. We also put the waterwheel on top of the mountain and when we poured water onto it, the water dripped into the river. We left soon after our older friends arrived and we went back to school to do some fun sensory activities.

We played with play dough, knives for cutting the play dough, rollers, scissors, spaghetti squeezers and some shapes for cutting out cookies. We then had a real fun messy activity using flour. We had to wear art smocks for this activity otherwise our clothes would have been white. The floor was covered with flour and our shoes and our hands and some of us even had flour in our hair. We loved the feeling when we touched it. We told our teachers that it was soft. Liam was not sure what to do when he touched it and he made a fist with both of his hands. Then when he opened his fingers he could also enjoy the soft texture.

Upstairs we played with the cork boards and shapes and nails. We continued making birthday hearts for Yossi and some of our teachers, who will be having their birthdays during Summer School.

Today was our first day with T-shirts in the park. We usually wear our smocks but today we all wore our T-shirts. We are learning how to put them on by ourselves which is an important step in being independent. On the way to the park we played our “I spy” game using colours and we also played our opposite game.

We had a wonderful time in the park mixing sand and water, making sand castles, mud cakes and snowballs. We have been taking our water bottles with us to the park as it is quite hot and we need to be able to rehydrate our bodies by drinking water as often as possible. We made origami penguins today. We know that some breed of penguins live in really cold climates where the ground is ice. When we were finished folding the origami paper, we placed our penguins on a large piece of white paper which we thought resembled ice. Shelley says that there is an amazing penguin colony in Cape Town, South Africa where she was born. South Africa is not a cold climate however the penguins that live there can live in warmer temperatures. They live on a beach and when you go and see them, the beach is completed filled with penguins; mums, dads and hundreds of baby penguins. We read “The Ugly Duckling” and some of us think that it is quite a sad story because the mother duck said that the “ugly duckling” was ugly and she didn’t like it. This duckling was not even a duckling and turned out to be a beautiful swan. Swans are the most beautiful birds in the whole world. We know that it is not how you look on the outside that is important, it is how you are inside; kind, caring, gentle, friendly etc.

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