Safari In Progress (7): Shops

04/03/2008 (Tuesday)

(i) Pre-Writing Exercise
Most mornings as the kids arrived in the classroom, they would play hide and seek with me. “Teacher, can you find me? Where am I?” These simple game and sentences told me that these kids are intelligent. They used to speak in Mandarin and now they use proper English more often
After drinking water, they arranged their tables and chairs. They were given their Pre-Writing book to practice on writing “a”. The more independent kids were SY, SYu, JN, M, JW, EG, WY, M and ZY who later did some colouring. JH, LX, SR, JS, ZJ and ZYg required more guidance to write persistently. Normally, they would do writing with some nursery songs as background. They would sing or even hum along.
(MI: Body-Kinesthetic, Intrapersonal Interpersonal, Linguistic, Musical skills)

(ii) Song: The wheels on the train
Then, we gathered in a circle and asked them what they had learnt yesterday. Most of them remembered it was train. So, they queued in a row to form a train. ZYg said we must hold our friend’s t-shirt while JN said we can’t if we wanted to move our hands like wheels. So, majority decided to move our hands like wheels. Then, we sang and moved in a circle. As for the steamer, we used our right hand to act as if pulling it. They enjoyed themselves very much especially when we sang from slow to fast and from whispering to aloud!
(MI: Body-Kinesthetic, Linguistic, Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, Musical skills)

(iii) Assessment: Animals vocabulary
To calm the kids, I took some soft toys to assess their animal vocabulary. They could name these animals independently: kangaroo, hippopotamus, leopard and cow. Some were unsure of these: frog, crab and koala bear. They related the kangaroo to its pouch and not pocket. They recalled that a cow is a female which produces milk while the male is ox. Meanwhile, the leopard could climb well and run very fast. What puzzled them was the female lion which looked like a leopard. Then, I took an Encyclopedia to show them the female lion which looked like the soft toy. Well, “seeing is believing”. They then realized that only a male lion has mane around its face and neck. The longer and darker the mane, the stronger the male lion is. At the same time, YZ, ZJ and ZY grabbed some storybooks to show me the male lion! The kids learnt so fast! I didn’t go into details about the features because we would be learning more in the coming lessons.
(MI: Intrapersonal, Linguistic, Naturalist skills)

(iv) Safari layout: Craft
Next, we continued our craft work. First, we talked about the shop and ticketing counter we intended to have. ZY and EG had already cut an ice-cream box at the earlier stage. I asked them if they would like the box original colour or create a pattern. 10 kids voted to have another colour. So, we did recap on the shapes learnt earlier. They could draw rectangles, triangles, ovals or even circles before colouring them.
Meanwhile, I called the kids individually to assess on their coin tracing. The coin tracing would create circles to be used for the trains wheels later. JS, ZYg, ZJ, LX, JH required more encouragement as they needed to balance their fingers. They were excited about the train but a little bit disappointed because we couldn’t complete the train craft yet. I told them, that they needed to have stronger fingers to make the craft step by step. Nevertheless, I praised them that their motor skills have shown improvement such as on LX, ZJ and JH. They smiled…..
(MI: Intrapersonal, Body-Kinesthetic, Spatial, Logical Mathematical skills)