Our pre-school (and school in general) has been missing a wildlife section for years. Admittedly, some of our more boisterous boys might qualify on a bad day...

To the shops, finding lots of bees collecting pollen along the riverbank on the way. It was actually warmer than we thought, even though it was grey and 'cloudy, cloudy' - the "How's the weather?" song from Let's Go is very popular!

We had to find the fish first - not easy as Watahan is big, and there are lots of aisles to look up & down. Squeals as we finally did find them - in the last corner we looked - and then had to decide which ones we liked. We asked the lady for six small goldfish, and a couple of bigger, speckled ones. We hope they don't eat the smaller ones?!

We prepared a home for them - a nice 'pond' we remembered from a story two weeks ago. We put in an air tube, and some nice coloured glass, and a crocodile to keep little fingers out! Then we carefully let the fish in, and fed them a bit. They looked shy & nervous, just like us when we meet people for the first time!

Apart from our new pets, we started putting letter sounds together; some nice card puzzles make it a thinking exercise & the word kind of incidental... and even bigger chunks of language with flashcards to make sentences. We are struggling now to find flashcards with vocab the kids do not know! A super fine day in pre-school then - well done :)

Bubbles & Squeeks

On Friday we finally finished our papier mache masks in pre-school. We realised we needed to varnish them before adding a decorative layer of paint, and that it needed time to dry! Fortunately, it was a nice sunny day, and we got the job done fabulously!

I think these masks are fairly robust and should last for a while. Painting them on the inside was a good way to make sure they don't delaminate (the vaseline we used to prevent the paper sticking to the plasticene also stopped it sticking to itself!

In between layers, we tested out our very fancy bubble machines, and had a hoot chasing big lumbering ones, and tiny bouncy ones, up the riverbank. We also tried to land them in the river from the bridge, but they blew so far away we couldn't see where they went!

For some reason the girls decided the spare box was a bath, so we learned a new Super Simple song - about the things we do in the bath, of course! Washing our noses and toes, for example. It was very funny as they kept falling out of the bath in stitches.

Our absolute favourite new game is is "Mr. Wolf"...and the children love to be 'it' or Mr. Wolf, and decide what time to call out. This is quite tricky, as they have to hold up the right card with the number on it or the Wolf card - can't let people get to close or they win; too far away when you shout "It's time to eat you!" and it is very hard to catch anybody running away!

Talking about my family

Today in pre-school we got into some really cool arts and crafts stuff, which we could never have done even a few months ago. The most important piece of equipment was...scissors!

How do you teach 'how to use scissors'? I suggest it's nigh on impossible! Every child has an entirely different background in manipulative & motor skills...how do you actually cut things successfully?! Thumb on top? Yes. Chop off fingers of other hand? No! Put them in left hand? OK - of course if that feels right! Cut along the lines? Well, that's the idea but a lot of experimentation is involved!

We were talking a lot about family, what we can/can't do, and recently the girls have been teaching us a Japanese finger chant which gives each finger a member of the family. Our "Finger Bobs" today was an English version of the same thing. We cut, glued and wore a finger family. As you can see, we need lots of fingers :)