The kids Go Green

Earth Day is celebrated on April 22 of every year. It is our children who will someday be responsible for taking care of our planet. We have to start educating them from young!

Here was one activity we did in class to help them love the earth and get involved in making it a better place.

Do you know the pastry man ?

There's nothing quite like the smell of freshly baked pastries in the morning..now, where's my tea ?



Our little chef brought some puff pastries to share with the teachers and friends. Mind you, this was not any ordinary puff pastry, this was homemade puff pastry by this cute little chef and his lovely mum. We love how the mum brought him into the process of learning. He could actually tell you how this was made, what ingredients he used and bla bla bla...After the show and tell, our little chef cut the pastry and served to his friends..lovely!

Great blogs

While I was searching for some printables sheets for our theme next month, I found these blogs :

A great place to get more ideas on extension for Montessori materials. I especially love her creativeness on EPL.
http://mymontessorijourney.typepad.com/

A blog by a mum sharing her fabulous ideas about homeschool and crafts
http://mama-jenn.blogspot.com/

April News

We had a great time learning all about dinosaurs during the past two weeks. The children have learned about the different kinds of dinosaurs, what they ate and how big they were. They can easily name dinosaurs in our classroom collection as well as in the numerous classroom books and know exactly what their names are. Pretending to be Paleontologists has been a lot of fun too. The children especially enjoyed looking for fossils in our garden.

Our fun and fantastic theme for April is about Community Helpers. The children will be learning a wide variety of job. Ask questions like “What does he do?” “Where does he work?” Name all the tools a community helper needs to complete the job. Talking about what your children want to be when they grow up. Play dress up as Doctor and Firefighter.

Some of the activities that we have planned for the children :
o In conjunction with Earth Day on 22nd Apr, we will teach the children what we can do as part of the community and what we can do to take care of the Earth. Children are invited to bring trash from home daily to throw away into the correct recycling bin that we prepared.
o We would like to extend our understanding on jobs by taking a further look at the job that you do. Children are invited to bring a photo or two on Wed, 14th Mar for show and tell to the class of their parents at work.
o As we close our unit on Community Helpers, we will have our field trip to the Fire Station onWed, 28th April. Info and permission slip will be sent out soon.

Paleontologists at work

On 24th Mar, we brought the children out to our backyard on a fossil hunting.

Mar News

I hope everyone enjoyed the festivities of Chinese New Year. Thank you for your lovely comments on the teachers’ Chinese New Year window decorations. We talked about the meaning of the celebration and twelve animals in the Chinese Zodiac, We also talked about Friendship and Valentines.

We have been practicing being nice to our friends by saying please and thank you, waiting for our turn and using a soft indoor voice. For art, we did activities related to our themes: making art using sunflower seeds, Chinese fans, dragons, paintings in the lucky colours and made heart shaped cards. We then wrapped up our celebration by having a Chinese New year snack.

In Feb the children learned about Garden and our children were involved with gardening and it was rewarding to watch their interest and self-esteem grow as their gardening efforts yielded good results. Some children insisted their mums to cook the onions that they brought home.

Our exciting theme in Mar will be Dinasours which is sure going to spark children’s interest in these fascinating prehistoric creatures. We will be teaching some of the different features of dinosaurs.
o Some had bony plates on their backs or heads.
o Some dinosaurs had spikes or horns.
o Some had very long necks and tails.
o Some dinosaurs had big teeth and claws.
o Some walked on two legs, while others walked on four legs.
0 Some ate meat; others ate plants.

We will have children create their own dinosaurs using paints. When the artwork is complete, we will encourage children to name their dinosaurs after themselves (such as Gabrielosaurus or Megan rex) and introduce their creations. We will cut out paper dinosaur footprints of various sizes and let the children put them in order from smallest to largest.

We will also be going on a dinasour hunt. We are going to have a special Paleontologist Day on Wed, March 24th. Your child may dress up as Paleontologist to school that day as well as bring in other tools that a Paleontologist needs such as binoculars, hat or toy camera. On this day, we will dig up dinasour fossils from the ground and fit them together to make dinasour skeletons.

Feb News

We had a great first month of school! Our focus for the first month was for the children to become familiar with school, including meeting new friends, learning routines and transitioning. They did a really nice job.

We also introduce some basic rules to the children. In Montessori environment, there are some basic expectations we have for the children such as we tell the children “walking feet” means walk safely and calmly in the environment, “indoor voices” means use gentle voices, no yelling across the environment. We constantly remind the children not to disturb others who are working and return materials in good order to shelves. In Feb, we will continue to focus on children’s care of environment and self like rolling mat, rolling socks, put shoes/bags on the correct places and grace and courtesy.

We will start our second theme with the study of Botany by introducing the topic about Garden. Some of the learning experiences planned for the children related to gardens include :
o acting out the story of The Enormous Turnip
o preparing a section of our play yard for a garden.
o planting onions and carrots
o smelling activity of different types of herbs that could be grown in the garden
o learning that worms in soil will make it better for plants

The week of Feb 8-Feb12, we will be talking about Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year. We will also have a Chinese New Year celebration on Feb 22 when the children come back to school after the Chinese New Year break. Children are invited to wear their Chinese costumes or wear something red. Children are invited to bring in food to share too.

Jan News

Happy New Year everyone! Welcome back to school! Some children are keen to be back and to catch up with their friends and teachers. It was lovely to receive your phone calls during school holidays. We missed you too! We have 6 new children start this month. They are Careen, Kien Ting, Tiffany, Maverick, Persia and Karen. We hope you enjoy your time with us. We will be spending most of our time getting the children know each other, daily routines and exploring the environment.

Our first theme is My School. We will be discussing about what we learn at school, people that help us at school, ourselves and friends and also Chinese New Year festival that we will be celebrating next month. Some fun activities we have already planned for children include sharing information about their family as well as themselves, counting how many boys and girls friends they have, create giant puzzle together and culture table of Chinese New Year.

Reminders :
o Please be informed that our school gate will be locked at 9.10am. If you’re late, pls ring the bell and wait. Try to be punctual so as not to cause disturbance to other children and teachers. Please send your child in promptly so your child does not lose any valuable learning time at the beginning of the session.
o Please label your child’s clothing and water tumbler as they always get mixed up and go home with the wrong child.
o If your child has been sick or had diarrhoea they should not attend school for 48 hours. This is to protect everyone in the school.

Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year

I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays....On behalf of LittleLand and all the teachers of LittleLand including me, would like to take this opportunity to wish all parents, children, families and friends a very Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year.

See you back to school on 4th Jan 2010!! We can't wait to be back in full force as we have many exciting activities planned for the children.

Christmas moments

We had a wonderful time during the past two weeks, with lots of stories, songs and laughs. The children are great!!