Hi and Bye!

Routines: stand up and turn around song, calendar, pop the balloons (when we go back to the tables)

Kindness pledge

Today I pledge to be kind,
to use the nicest words I can find.
Today I pledge to try to share,
to wait my turn and to be fair.

After singing some old songs together and learning a new rhyme, I told the kids that we're going to do some acting/role-playing today! I read a few pages of the book < Perfect Pigs > to them. It has a lot of pictures that show how the little pigs behave. I asked the kids to volunteer to show me some situations of nice sharing. They're so honest though! When I asked Cooper to hold a toy, and Giada to ask him, "Can I play with the toy please?", Cooper said, "No. I want to play with it." A lot of times, kids don't intend to be mean, but what they want comes straight from their heart and out from their mouth. So it really takes practice and reinforcement to develop their sense of sharing and playing nicely with each other. So I said to them, "Well, if we really want to play with that toy at the moment, we can say to our friend, 'Yes, but you have to wait for 5 minutes because I'm playing with it now.'" I've been reminding them about this during their playing time, and I know that they know this makes everybody happier and more friendly, but they just forget sometimes. =P

We made waving hands today! I asked each kid to pick a colour of construction paper, and place their hand on it. Then I went around to trace their hands. I let them cut out the shape at first, but it didn't work because it was too hard for them, and they tried very hard to follow the finger lines. So I ended up cutting for them. Some of them had to have their hands traced again because they cut their "hand" into too many small pieces. After that, I gave each of them the word "Hi!" and "Bye!" I asked them to glue one on each side of their hand. The last step was to glue a stick onto the bottom of the hand, and then we're done! This craft will be used for practicing greeting, because I noticed that many kids who've grown comfortable to our school aren't greeting their parents right away when they come to pick them up. I want them to practice being polite to their parents, and as well as saying bye to the teachers when they leave. =)