Hello everyone!🤗 Halloween party at school is getting near and Aurora class is looking forward to this event! Yes, everybody is excited for the Halloween party on October 28th! They keep talking about their costumes for the party and love dancing the Creepy Crawl. Here’s the link and enjoy dancing with your kids!
Aurora class finished their last Halloween themed craft which is Lacing Paper Frankenstein. We used two cardboards for the face which they colored with green using crayons and laced the pieces together using black yarn to create the mouth. They also drew the eyes and nose. The final touch is pasting the hair and ears of Frankenstein! Lacing, coloring, and gluing are a great fine motor skill builder which will help children perform important tasks such as feeding themselves, grasping objects, and writing.
We really could feel Halloween in our classroom for our class is already enjoying wearing different costumes in their dress-up play. Dress-up play is more than just physically wearing a costume. When “in character” kids role play. They imitate the character’s mannerisms and may even create their own special traits and themes, which encourages kids to “think outside of the box,” practice different emotions, and use their language skills to communicate too.
Let’s take a look at how Aurora class enjoys dress-up play as they learn taking turns and being more caring to one another!🤩
In Phonics, we learned about the uppercase and lowercase letter Pp, its sound, and the words that begin with the letter as in panda, pig, pan, penguin, plant and parachute. We also did a group letter search activity. Students found all the letter Pp’s on the big paper and colored them. After that, they looked closely at their work and noticed that they formed a giant uppercase and lowercase letter Pp. Great, they found the mystery letter!
They were also given a chance to reflect on their work and check by themselves if they only colored the letter Pp. They were very keen observers that they found their own mistakes because others colored lowercase letters b, d and q. This was also a good opportunity to know the confusing letters for them and work on it.
In UOI, we finished the presentation of their homework about feelings inside their house and everyone did a great job in sharing their feelings and constructing simple sentences like “I’m happy because mom is in the house.”👏
To close LOI1, I read the book The Gingerbread Man and asked students to identify the feelings of the characters in the story and we even listened, sang, and danced the songs we are going to use for our role-play presentation on the Christmas Show. Their answers clearly showed that they understood the story and the feelings that we learned in LOI1. Great job, everyone!⭐
Then, we started with LOI2: Ways to communicate with others. To know if the students have an idea how to communicate with people we asked them interesting and tricky questions and one of them is: “What if you are not allowed to talk, how are you going to tell your mom that you are hungry? They thought of an answer and one student showed me this (see the picture below) and from there we discovered that we can use our body language to communicate with people.
Another activity we did was the Mirror Face activity. The teacher called out various feelings and students looked at the mirror while showing the feelings told by the teacher. They were a little shy at first to see themselves in the mirror and make faces, but afterwards they confidently and perfectly were able to show different feelings in the mirror. Thank you so much, dear parents, for the mirror they brought to school!🪞
Because it’s Autumn season now, it’s also sweet potato season here in Japan which we incorporate in our gym class activities! Aurora imitated the shape of sweet potatoes and rolled over the mat. They also learned how to do forward roll. A forward roll activates the tummy muscles which in turn will stabilize the spine. This control will also help them coordinate their arms and legs as they move through the forward roll. By practicing forward rolls, children have to exert equal amounts of force on each side of the body in order to roll over.
That’s all for this week! Thank you for reading our blog and have a wonderful weekend!😊
