Lining Up

A while ago I made a lesson around The Line Up Book by by Marisabina Russo. The book is about a little boy who lines up all sorts of objects in his home until he reaches the kitchen where his mother is. While reading we talked about familiar objects, colors, shapes, etc. Then the children took turns lining up blocks in our classroom & counted how many blocks were lined up. Afterwards we practiced taking a walk around the school with our ring rope while discussing our surroundings outside. At first it was a struggle but the children are getting more & more used to holding onto the rope since their first reaction was to run for it out of excitement. :-P However they are getting better and better the more we practice & did a great job at our field trip when we tried it out. I also think they're a lot happier when they're more active & have the chance to get out of the classroom & stretch out their little limbs! :-)

Thank you!

I want to thank my mother or as the children know her Ms. Junko for always supporting my work and caring about the toddlers so much. She has even worked in my place when I went on vacation and it's really heart warming to see the love she has for them and vice versa. She donated play doh for the children to help develop their fine motor skills as well as brand new balls for outdoor play since the one ball we have at the school looks like it's been there since the dinosaur age. Thank you Ms. Junko!!

Colorful Snowballs!

The day after we received our snowman, I had planned to do a lesson where the children could draw faces onto their own snowmen or even just create colorful snowmen. However I encountered some problems as the frozen, stacked heads kept breaking off. So we ended up painting colors on snowballs instead. We discussed similar things as the previous day such as how the snowballs felt (cold, smooth, bumpy, etc), how they looked (big, small, round, like a circle or sphere, etc) & identified different colors that we used. We also talked about how winter is cold & how when it snows we can build snowmen or create snowballs. After everyone finished their snowballs we briefly went outside so that the children could throw them onto the playground and see how far they their snowballs would go. Thank you so much to the person who sent the snowmen to the school! Our class was really lucky to have this opportunity in Okinawa & the children had so much fun!

Snowman

Last month someone had a few snowmen shipped to our school from mainland Japan! We were really lucky because there were only three and all of the other classes were on field trips so one of the multi-age teachers gave us one of the snowmen for our class! It was very exciting since Okinawa is too warm for snow! After we all got the experience of seeing & feeling the smooth surface of the snowman, he began melting away. I figured why not turn this into a sensory/fine motor activity & crushed the snowman for the children to play with. While we played we talked about how it felt in our hands, what kinds of shapes we could create with it, how cold it was, etc. Although the children are so young a lot of them made the connection that it melted into water which was very neat!

Unity Wreath & Baby Tiger

Hello everyone! Last month since we had Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 21st, I found an activity on the internet to remember a brilliant man who did great things for our world as well as rejoice, respect, & appreciate the fact that we all come from different cultures but are all great friends. We created a unity wreath by tracing our hands & using crayon to represent our different skin tones. Unfortunately we had very limited resources so we were unable to use paint at this time to create more realistic skin tones. However the children enjoyed the activity & finding their hands on the wreath which we hung up outside of our door for the other classrooms to see. We had an absent student so we left a spot for her for when she came back to school which is why there is a little open space on the wreath. :-)

Thank you DLT-Kids for the idea! Click here to see resource!

Also during the month of January we focused a lot on wild animals. We read one of our classroom books called Baby Tiger by (unknown will edit in the author later) which is a classroom favorite. Then the children identified different animal parts and put them onto the tiger where they belonged. We also identified our own body parts & talked about how some of them are similar to the tigers.