We hosted this week’s playdate at our home, and since we’ve moved on to the theme of animals/farm/zoo, I decided to set up three different animal-related stations for the children to explore, while waiting for the session to begin.
In line with the organisation skills that we picked up at the workshop, I placed the toys in a small box, the puzzles on a tray, and the books in a larger box. I mixed the English and Chinese books together, partly because I didn’t have any extra boxes, and also because the mat wasn’t big enough to accommodate more sections.
The set-up
The children were free to choose what they wanted to do, and I noticed that the toys and books were more popular than the puzzles. After a while, they started to lose interest in what was on the mat, and moved to explore the other toys in the living room, so we got them to put everything away, and to sit down on the mat, to start our playdate with the Welcome song.
Mummy L introduced four animals to the children: cow, rooster, pig, and duck. The children were quite familiar with the four animals, but I thought it was good that Mummy L brought along the figurines of the animals, so that each child could hold and touch a different one. We then modified the lyrics of the Colours song, and made it the Animals song instead.
Introducing the animals
For story time, I read The Cow That Laid an Egg
, as I personally find it quite entertaining. Mummy S did raise a good point when she asked if the children would be confused by it, so I guess we have to spend time talking to the children, and telling them that cows don’t actually lay eggs.
The Cow that Laid an Egg
We made shakers out of toilet rolls during our craft segment, and I think the children seem to be getting better at pasting the tapes down now. For more details on how we made it, as well as other suggestions on what you can do with the shakers, you can refer to this post.
Working on their shakers
When they were done, I served the kids a simple snack of raisin bread, biscuits, and grapes. Noah ate only the grapes, before running off to play, and the other children joined him too. We let them play for a couple of minutes, so that we could chat while having our overnight oats.
Snack time
Mummy E read a Chinese book about Spot visiting the farm, and got the kids to help with lifting the flaps on the pages. These interactive books really seem to be able to capture their attention better, but Noah wasn’t too keen on it. I had a tough time trying to get him to even sit down for the Chinese story!
Chinese story time
Noah seemed especially restless this time round, and wasn’t very cooperative for the Practical Life Skills segment, which was such a pity, because there were four very interesting activities. They were given Lego blocks in four different colours for sorting, a tray of different sized pom-poms to scoop into a large container, some jigsaw puzzles, and a button snake. Noah was only keen on scooping the pom-poms, and refused to finish sorting the Lego blocks. He hasn’t really worked with puzzles or the button snake before, so he needed a lot of help for the former, and walked away when I tried to get him to do the latter.
Mummy L reminded me not to force him to do anything if he’s not ready, and I was thankful for that reminder, because I get easily frustrated when Noah doesn’t follow my instructions. I often forget to consider that he is simply not ready, instead of him being disobedient, and should remember to follow his pace instead.
Sorting
Scooping
Puzzles
Button snake
For our Big Muscles Exercise, we decided to try something new, and gave the children beanbags to balance on their heads. Initially, we thought we would do it as a relay, but we quickly realised that they couldn’t even balance the beanbags on their heads, so we just made it a balancing exercise instead.
Balancing beanbags
We then got the children to sing some songs with their shakers, before closing with our Goodbye song.
Shake, shake, shake!
We managed to take some fairly decent group photos this week, probably because it was a smaller group, and the girls are really good with standing still!
Mandatory group shot
Our neighbour has a rather large terrapin that he keeps in a tank along the common corridor, so I asked him if the children could stop by to take a look at it, since our theme is on animals this term. (Yes, I know a terrapin isn’t classified as an animal, but we’re not very strict about these things.) He very kindly took the terrapin out of its tank, and let it walk around the corridor, while the children observed it from a distance. I thought it was quite a fun experience for them!
Checking out the terrapin
We won’t be having our usual indoor session next week, and I’m very excited about where we’ll be going. I’m not going to reveal our plans now, so check back next week to see what we did, okay?
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