Winter has arrived

Last Monday was such a dark day and brought with it all the symptoms of Winter.However,the children are as usual full of the joys of life , that one cannot feel ,even for a minute, dismal or sad..They all have their little routines and arrive full of smiles eager to “work” and the room is a hive of activity.Polishing is still the favourite activity for Conor, Sean, Odhran, Lugh, Zav and Keelan and they now take such pride in shinning their work to real perfection.As only 3 can polish at a time the others are grating soap or washing dusters until their turn.And as the polishing table is right beside the window they also have prime view of the birds on the feeders so their chatter is regularly interrupted by someone saying “quiet, there s a goldfinch or bluetit, great tit , chaffinch” etc. They then proceed to count the different species and are so good at this that Birdwatch Ireland could benefit from their help! Insets or cutting and glueing are a very popular start to the morning for Aimee ,Asher ,Mella, Leah, Vivienne and Phoebe.The children settle in very quickly and after a while approach me to introduce some new work, usually something which they are eager to find out about. This may be something which they may have seen me introduce at circle time or which they ve seen another child do.Last week dressing frames were on the go:zips,fasteners and buttons for the boys and bows for a couple of the girls. A few children are reading word boxes well and were introduced to the verb and noun boxes while another group are enjoying doing their”sounds”.The pink tower and broad stairs also come out on a daily basis whilst cylinders are being experimented with matching the knobless and knobbed.Again some of the older ones are loving number work and started on golden beads. Asher loves the binomal cube and I ve promised to introduce the trinomal to morrow!After introducing planet earth at circle time on monday we then looked at the continents on colour globe followed by the jigsaw map of the world on consecutive days. I then decided that we would look at S.America first.The children really enjoyed looking at the folders with pictures of the people an animals of S.America. I read a story about a family who lived in the rainforest.Some of the children traced the map and brought it home to find pictures of children. We will follow on with a little project on the rainforest and each child will find out about an animal as we climb the layers of the rainforest. This was alot of fun when we did this a couple of years ago and we will build our own rainforest and display it in the school. Never a dull moment and so much to do with such wonderful little workers!