We're counting the days at school

We are counting the days we have been at school. We use different equipment to help us.

We also count with our happy flies.

When we get to 100 days at school we are going to have a 100 day party. Angus likes to count on the beads. Jasper likes to count with the popsicle sticks using bundles of tens and ones. Logan and Maisy like to count with the tens frames. Sienna and Cooper like to show the number of days using the flip board. Emma likes to count on the hundreds board. Today we have been at school for 38 days. We know the number that comes after 38 is 39 so tomorrow we will have been at school for 39 days. Mrs Scott told us we have 62 days to go before we get to 100.

Our Swimming Sports

Two weeks ago we had our Junior school swimming sports. We had lots of fun going in the different races we had and we were really patient while we waited for our turn. Check out our photos of the swimming sports. We wrote about what we enjoyed about the swimming sports.

Ukulele progress

We are continuing to practise our ukulele skills each Friday morning with Naomi. We can play a whole tune now. We have really enjoyed playing the 'Wheels on the bus' and each having a turn at saying what is happening on the bus.  Have a listen.....

 

Sensory - This week's sense was touch

This week our sensory session was on the touch sense.

We got to explore different things to touch. Here is an example of some of the things we explored with our hands.

Maisy really enjoyed the feel of the mohair scarf. Jasper enjoyed getting this brush rubbed on his legs, arms and back.

Some of us had a turn in the body sock. Check us out, we tried to make different shapes inside the body sock.

Angus felt a little scared inside the body sock as he couldn't see.

All of us liked exploring these spiky balls that you could squeeze and press and see the worms that looked trapped inside. Inside one of the balls there looked like a shell.  After we had had time exploring, we thought about how touching certain things made our engines feel. We learnt that we all thought the mohair scarf and the kinetic sand made our engines feel 'just right.' When we got back to our classroom we wrote about our touch experience and related it back to 'Our Zones of Regulation' or how touching a specific thing made our engine feel. 

Here are our stories........

Sensory - We focussed on our sense of sight

Last week we focussed on our sense of sight. This was how looking at different things with our eyes makes our engines feel, what colours or things slow down our engines and which things speed our engines up.

After looking at these different colours we found out that the colour that made our engine just right was the green colour for all of us. The pale pink was also just right for most of our engines. The colour red increased the speed of our engines. We then looked at some picture scenes. Here are some examples of what we looked at.

The beach scene made some of our engines run too fast because we can get excited at the beach swimming in the water and making sand castles. Someone said their engine ran slow and was in the blue zone when they saw the sail boat because they knew they got sea sick. After we looked at each slide, we used our dial to say how this made our engine feel.

One of the pictures that really calmed our engines was this one of a city street that you can see on our tv screen.

We enjoyed looking at the picture and searching for different things. An example of this was, Can you see a person with a striped top? Find someone on a bike. We also liked looking at pictures that modelled examples of good behaviour to us, such as the children sitting on the mat.

This picture of the untidy room either made our engines run too fast for half of us or made our engines run too slow.

At the end of our session on sight we discovered that different pictures and colours can changes how our engines feel. Some of the colours or pictures do similar things to all of our engines and that using pictures as models and searching for information in pictures can help our engines to feel just right.

Finnie has a lovely clean home

Our pet fish Finnie has had his habitat cleaned. We have learnt that Finnie's habitat is his home. He has been so happy in his clean tank that he has been swimming around and around. I wonder if he can see his reflection in the tank? I think we may need to start searching for a friend for Finnie. Maybe he is getting lonely?

We wrote books about ourselves

We spent the first few weeks of the term being authors and illustrators. We wrote a book about ourselves and drew the pictures. 

We liked writing our books and drawing the pictures. We are learning that another name for the pictures is illustrations.  We put a spine on our books.  We really like looking, reading and sharing our books with others. Our books are hanging in our class if you want to come and read them.

We choose our favourite page of our book. Check them out to see what you can find out about us.

We have put together a slide of some of our pages in our books. These are not all the pages but a sample of some of them. 

This week's sensory was push, pull and heavy work

This week we focussed on push, pull and heavy work. We began our session with Joy by playing tug of war. The heavy pulling action made some of us very tired as we tried to pull the rope away from the other team. 

Angus showed us his sore hand from pulling so hard.

We reflected on our dials about how tug of war made our engines feel.

Next we imagined the rope was a slithering snake and we had to jump over it. 

Cooper really enjoyed holding the end of the rope and making it slither along the ground.

We had a turn with the zoom ball. You had to open your arms out to make the ball zoom towards your partner.  We really enjoyed working with the zoom ball.

Next we did some pushing to see how this made our engines feel. Some of us hopped in the box and we tried pushing the box. This calmed our engines for those of us that were pushing. We even enjoyed seeing how many we could fit on and in the box.

We had such a fun time at sensory today. Thanks Joy for helping us to become more aware of how our engines run when we try different activities.