A string of wool arrived at school the other morning and before you could say 'cat's cradle' it seemed that every child was busy weaving patterns with a coloured loop of wool.
And so we have 'bunch of bananas', 'keys', 'Jazz's heater', 'trap', 'bridge' and various others.
Even the teacher remembered way back in the dim recesses of past recesses and 'parachute' appeared on her hand, much to the joy of several on-lookers....
Knitting continues, some children have caught the knitting bug, warm, woollen and slightly loopy and have to be reminded to eat recess and lunch food. One child managed to mysteriously increase the number of stitches on his needle to more than double the original 22...
Back up on the farm, Farmer George has been planting potatoes, in rows, with exactly the same number in each row. The children used their counters to make up their own potato gardens, making sure that each row had the same number of potatoes. They then recorded the number of potatoes in a row, the number of rows and the total number of potatoes.
One talented mathematician looked up at me with shining eyes as I stopped to see his potato gardens and said 'This is times! We're doing times tables aren't we Lynne?'
At lunch time, out in the sandpit, several children had begun to loosen up the old wooden posts around the edge of the sandpit after I told them that Ken, the gardener, wanted to pull them all out as most of them had started rotting at the base. Using hand trowels and small rakes, the activity around the posts was enough to move mountains.
One child commented that the posts were kind of like loose teeth...a very relevant topic in the class at the moment. And so the posts became the giant's wobbly teeth with a huge cheer every time one was loosened and rolled out of it's hole.
The school Principal, Alan, happened to walk past just as one of the giant's teeth wobbled out, accompanied by an excited cheering from several small excavators.
When I explained to him what was going on in the sandpit he said 'You know Lynne, when these children are grown up and they remember back to class 1 this is probably what they will remember most!'
This week we all brought our bikes and helmets to school in anticipation of two full days of Bike Skills activities with Chris a PDHPE teacher from our High School. Unfortunately Chris was away on sick leave and the children were amazingly accepting of the change of plans.
In lieu of bike-riding we made two 2,4,6,8,10 apple cakes (2 eggs, 4 tblspns oil, 6 tblspns sugar, 8 tblspns milk, 10 tblspns s.r flour covered with sliced apples, sprinkled with cinnamon, sugar, and bits of butter & baked) and continued sorting seeds (counters) and recording the results in our main lesson books.
Several boys began a 'grinding factory' by placing two bikes upside down on the grass and placing the front wheels touching each other. By turning the two wheels quickly they managed to grind small pieces of soft timber from the giant's teeth posts.
Our meal blessing was sung accompanied by a most delicious smell of cooking apple cake....
In leaf and stem, water, fire in the fruit, air in the blossom, earth in the root,
Fairies of the water, earth, air and fire, ceaselessly work for a plant to have birth'.
Spring is definitely on it's way...cubbies made from old sheets and garlands made from jasmine vine created quite a festive feeling in the garden at lunchtime. While in the classroom several children put in some quality time constructing marble races from interestingly shaped pieces of wood......
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