MINIS
On Monday we focused on dressing up and dressing down by ourselves, we dedicated almost the entire morning for that and took our time. Dressing up is an age appropriate and important skill to learn. It practices hand and eye coordination and fine motor skills. While dressing up we discussed the themes of toy day which are taking care of your own belongings and ownership. for example, ‘this is MY hat and MY hat goes to MY locker.’ After that the children had the remaining 20 minutes of free play with their toys.
Tuesday, we had animal yoga where we practiced the names of the animals, the positions and listening to instructions. The children love our yoga sessions and mimicking each animal. This activity supports learning to participate in group activities, listening, and of course motor skills all while having fun.
On Wednesday we had arts and crafts where we decorated our own vappu donuts, we practiced snipping little pieces of paper with scissors, which was exciting for the kids. They then got to decorate their own donuts with multiple materials including silk paper, glitter, and yarn, to make practicing fine motor skills a multi-sensory experience for the children.
On Thursday it was music, where the kids get to experience self-expression through music and creativity. We kept practicing our instruments and songs for the upcoming spring party. The party fort is still a big thing and offers lots of joy to the little ones, another favorite is making the colorful scarfs dance to the music. They all participated very nicely, and lots of little smiles were visible.
On Friday we joined maxis for a walk in the surrounding area. The maxis were picking up trash and the minis helped point the trash out. We talked about the different materials and why it is not good to throw trash on the ground, the meaning of recycling and more. Minis were hungry and tired after our walk, so lunch was much more quiet than usual, but after recharging in the nap room they were all ready and eager eat some snack and free play!
See you next week!
Aria & Tanya
Next week´s plan:
Monday: Toy day
Tuesday: Vappu disco
Wednesday: CLOSED
Thursday: Music
Friday: Story Day
MAXIS
What a week! We are now well into our Spring related activities but it seems that winter just doesn’t want to let go this year. However, despite us adults grumbling about the weather, we can’t deny that the children had a lot of fun as the sledges, snowballs and snowmen reappeared albeit for a short while.
We began the week with the morning circle and an introduction about Ankkalampi’s Environmental Awareness week. As well as their toys we asked the children to bring a piece of trash from home with them and we explained that we will discuss what recycling is about later on in the week. During the morning the children also had the opportunity to play with their toys and visit the Pizza Koti Leikki for role playing.
It was Hranta’s turn to visit Kulosaari for the viskari club and we decided to catch the bus instead of walking this week because of the heavy snow. This week we started to look at two dimensional shapes and began looking at their properties. We looked at what an edge of the shape is and how to count the number of edges shapes have. The focus this week was a circle, triangle and a square. We played a few interactive games using a computer and then the children had a 3 shape jig-saw puzzle to solve. We will continue next week discovering more about shapes and why they are important. Meanwhile the rest of the group had another activity together. Since it was the National Book Day (known in Catalonia as St. George´s Day) children got to participate in this cultural tradition by creating their own story. Each of them had to do a different drawing without telling the rest about it and when they were finished they came up with a story together using all their drawings. It was a great way to enhance their creativity and we could see their great imagination with the story. It is important to let you know that mainly we used the English language during the activity, so it was an excellent language development for them! After that we displayed a video about the St. George legend in English for them to get to know more about this celebration. The story is placed at the dining area for you to see, so please make sure you get the right time to read it through, it will for sure not leave you indifferent!
We continued with the Environmental Awareness theme during Wednesday and Friday. After a power point presentation learning about different materials and the importance and the relevance of recycling these materials it was all hands on deck for the children. The children were presented with an array of trash and 5 recycling boxes. The children had to decide which box each piece of trash had to go into and to be fair they did an excellent job at doing so. Friday morning we went for a walk with our XL rubber gloves over our regular gloves to collect some ‘misplaced’ trash around the area of the day care. It was somewhat an unsuccessful activity as we didn’t manage to collect a great deal, which in hindsight is a good thing! However the little trash we did collect, we ensured that they went to the correct bin when we came back to the day care.
During Thursday morning the children continued practicing their performances for the Spring concert in the music lesson and we also finished our Spring stones painting activity. We hope they bring some color to the front yard during these grey days!
Have a great weekend,
Trystan and Marta
Next week´s plan:
Monday: Toy Day
Tuesday: Vappu disco
Wednesday : CLOSED
Thursday: Music and Table Task
Friday: Arts and Craft