We hosted this week’s playdate, and I’m really enjoying this term’s theme of animals! We’re working on farm animals at the moment, and will move on to zoo animals after that.
I placed some books and toys in the free play area, but as usual, the children were drawn to the toys instead of the books. I think they found LeapFrog Farm Animal Mash-Up Kit
quite entertaining, especially when they put two halves of different animals together.
Free Play
Leapfrog Farm Animal Mash-Up Kit
Playing together
We revised the animals (cow and chicken) that we learnt in the previous session, before I introduced the horse and dog to them. I think the children are all familiar with these animals actually, so I read some information about the horse and dog, from the Baby Einstein: Baby Noah Touch and Feel Discovery Cards
that I had, and let them touch the different textures on the cards. They also got to play with the horse and dog from the
, which I think they enjoyed.
Revision
Discovery cards and Sound Puzzle
Learning about the horse
Playing with the sound puzzle
For story-time, I read one of our favourite Sandra Boynton books, Barnyard Dance!
, and got everyone to do the actions during the second reading of the book.
Barnyard Dance
Cluck, cluck, cluck!
We didn’t have our craft activity this week, and spent more time on the Practical Life skills instead. Mummy L prepared five different stations for the four kids, which was a great idea, as we usually have a bottleneck at some point, when the station to child ratio is the same. The children had to match the front and back halves of the animals, work on a button snake, sort animals according to colours, stack blocks, and use wooden tweezers to pick up apples. The last station was definitely the most challenging, and Noah ended up picking up the apples with his fingers instead.
Matching
Button snake
Sorting
Stacking
Moving the apples from the tree to the crate
The children then had their snack on the playmat, while the mums were very blessed to have homemade cakes by Mummy L.
Kids snacking
What the mums had
Mummy J introduced the names of some animals in Chinese after snack time, which Noah is still struggling to learn.
Learning the Chinese names of some animals
I loved the next segment, led by Mummy E. She taught us how to sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat in Chinese, and complete with actions too. We went faster and faster, because we looked around, and spied crocodiles chasing us. The kids (and mums) really loved this, and there was a lot of laughter and huge smiles all round.
Rowing
Looking for crocodiles
We headed out to the common corridor for our Big Muscle Activity, where the children had to pick up bottle covers from one end, and run to drop them in another box at the other end. Noah has a lot of fun doing this in Gymnademics, but I think he was thrown off by the different set-up, and ended up hanging out with the bottle covers, rather than picking them up. The mums also agreed that the space was a little limited, and we’ll probably try this again next week, but at the void deck instead.
Hanging out with the bottle covers
We erm, forgot to sing our action songs, and ended with only the goodbye song, and our customary group photo. The children were a lot more cooperative this week, so we got some pretty nice shots.
Everyone’s looking at the camera for once!
Looking forward to our next playdate already!
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