Writing in the sand

It was a beautiful warm day today and the park was filled with children making mud and filling up jugs and bottles with water. We also filled some bottles with water however we wrote our name in the sand with it and made patterns on the sand. Darren showed us how to pour the water gently and make specific shapes on the dry sand. He made “Finn” and then Finn also started to pour water onto the sand. Sui spent time filling a bottle with sand which is what she loves to do every time we go to the park. She walks around the park looking for dry sand and then pours it into the bottle. She found a little girl to play with today and they chatted to one another and had fun. Finn also enjoyed sliding down the roller slide with both Wendy and Shelley (separately). It was great to welcome Wendy back today and slowly but surely we are settling back to our busy Ohana days. We started off our day with actions and singing and then moved into our regular circle time sing-song. Finn spoke about growing into a flower so before we started our circle time, Shelley planted us in the ground and pretended that we were seeds. She watered us and sang “I hear thunder” and “Ame dear Ame”. Then she made a circle shape with her hands as if she was the sun and sang “Good morning Mr. Sun” and the last song was “I am a little flower” and we all danced together. We made our arms into the shape of a circle too and then we stretched them out horizontally and made them look like a line. The last shape we made was a triangle. After this we started singing the action song. We clicked our fingers, popped our lips, tapped our knees, clapped our hands, blew a kiss and tapped the floor. Then we sang our “Hello” song as well as “Sunday, Monday……” Finn guessed that today was “Monday” and he was correct. Together he and Sui chose the words and pictures to make our “Today is” chart accurate. When we were looking at the month which is May, we spoke about the sound of the “m”. Shelley then said that the day of the week, has the same beginning sound as the beginning sound in “May”. Finn found it and placed it at the top of the chart. Sui chose both sunny and cloudy for the weather today and then we started playing a game and singing a song about numbers. The song is called “Numba Rhumba”. The Wiggles sing a similar song on their CD. We sang the song using the numbers one to five and we had the symbolic representation of numbers to look at on the carpet viz. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The actions for each number rhymed with the number e.g. one – fun; two – shoe; three – bee; four – floor and five – alive. We had turns to place the numbers back in the puzzle and the last part of this learning experience was trying to find the same number somewhere else in the puzzle.

After snack time we went to the activity table and made a birthday picture for Darren and we will celebrate his birthday with him later in the week. We also need our other friends to draw their pictures for his birthday book. The second activity that we did at the tables was with the light table and flour. We are becoming familiar with many letters and their sounds and some of us are even able to write our names on paper. One of the many steps that come before this, is “writing” in flour/sand. Our teachers poured flour onto the light table and we used small measuring spoons to play with the flour and make shapes. We also learnt how to use our finger as if it was a marker or pencil and draw with it.

In the other photo here you can see Sui chan with her sunflower in a pot. Today we are taking them home and we can plant them in our garden or in a bigger pot and watch them grow even bigger.

Our story today was about going to school for the first time. It was called “Periwinkle and Blue go to school”. Periwinkle had never been to school so he was both excited and nervous. We think that when we started school, we had the same mixed up feelings. At the end of the day, Periwinkle didn’t want to go home however he knew that he was going to be there the following day, and he went home happily. Shelley tried to ask us what the best part of our day at school is, but it was tricky.

Love Shelley and Darren