All about me!

After getting to know our new friends and settling into the classroom, we kicked off the school year with our first unit: All About Me. We began by exploring the Zones of Regulation and our senses by creating our own feelings meters using handprints. The tickling feeling of the brush made us laugh a lot! Alongside this, we learned our first sound from the Jolly Phonics programme and couldn’t stop singing the "S" song all week. For our entry point, we created a class friendship book where each student filled in an "All About Me" page, helping us to find many similarities with our new friends. We’ll continue to add new friends throughout the year.

In the second week, we focused on the outside parts of our bodies. We started by labelling some of the students' body parts by placing pictures in the correct spots. Then, we traced our bodies on large sheets of paper and painted them in our favourite colours. We played various hands-on body parts games, and by the end of the week, we could all identify and label the different body parts on our big paintings. We also danced to the song "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" in English as well as in Japanese, Dutch, German, French, and other languages spoken by the students' families. It was lots of fun listening to all these different languages and dancing along to them.

During the third week, we made a body puzzle where we matched body parts to the correct spots and we measured different body parts with blocks to see how long they were. We then delved deeper into the body to discover our inside body parts. We pretended to be doctors using an X-ray machine to look at bones, crafted our own skeletons, and did pre-writing exercises on the pretend X-ray machine.

The fourth week focused on what makes us unique and special. We began by learning about each other’s home countries. We listened to the different languages, located the countries on the world map, explored them using pictures, and studied the flags. The children also explored their likes and dislikes, including foods they enjoy eating by finding them in grocery leaflets and cutting them out to fill their stomachs. We played an interactive sorting game to find out how many students liked or disliked certain things, such as rain or music. The week ended with our first trip of the year, to an exhibition all about the body. The children did an amazing job showing off all the internal and external body parts they could name and recognise.

In the fifth week, we got to know each other’s families. We practised naming different family members, using words like baby, brother, mum, and grandpa in playful activities. We also played a fun counting game where we put families in different houses and even wrote numbers on the houses. To finish the week, we crafted beautiful house frames for our family pictures, and the results were lovely.

Week 6 was a very busy week as we went on two trips. First, we visited a retirement home, where we enjoyed a musical balloon activity with the elderly. We met many wonderful people and made new connections. Then we learned how babies grow inside their mothers bellies. We started by measuring and sorting babies from smallest to biggest and went on our second trip to the museum to learn more about how babies grow.

After finding so many leaves outside, the 7^th week just had to be all about autumn. We learned how to make our own leaf rubbings and even created graphs to show the colours of the leaves we found on the playground. We kept finding mushrooms outside, so we crafted unique magic mushroom forests. The week concluded with an autumn walk where we found and examined chestnuts, beechnuts, bolsters, acorns, snails, pinecones, leaves of different colours, and various mushrooms. They really had a blast during this hunt. In the afternoon, a guide led us through a spider exhibition, where we learned everything there is to know about spiders and even got to touch an old spider skin and teeth. Everyone was so brave and found it very interesting.

Week 8, the final week of our unit, was filled with Halloween spirit. We found a recipe for pumpkin soup and went to the grocery store together to gather the ingredients. Then, it was time for our first group project: giving our pumpkin a scary Halloween face. Everyone worked together brilliantly, cutting out shapes and collaborating. We read a funny book about witches and their brew and played a counting board game where we made our own potions. Did you know the Frog class is great at imitating scary monsters and witches? We ended the week with a spooky phonics game to review all the sounds we had learned over the past weeks. Finally, we said goodbye to our pumpkin friend and cooked our own pumpkin soup, practising how to safely use a knife to cut the vegetables. The week wrapped up with a Halloween party where we dressed up, enjoyed our homemade soup, shared spooky snacks, and had a dance party.

Have a lovely autumn break, everyone!