Evening Session - Sharing My Backyard

Each month I close one morning to open one evening.

This gives the whole family time to come together to play

and share a meal.

We do a potluck, usually at the school.

This month I hosted it at my house.

I wanted to share my husband's passion for trains

and invited the families to come and play

in our backyard.

These pictures show a bit of what my husband, Raymond,

 has designed and created.

Knowing that the children would want to play with the trains 

Raymond set out two train tracks on the deck

for the children to use.

The rule was;

Everything on the deck was hands on to play with,

everything on the grass was just to look at. 

Although I did create a scavenger hunt with pictures of some of

the Playmobile objects he used.

The children played and played.

Taking turns with the controls or enjoying moving the people, buildings

and other vehicles around.

Occasionally a train would derail and Raymond would fix it.

But as we know children will watch everything we do

and they were soon fixing it themselves.

Back on the grass the children ran around chasing the train

seeing where it was going and trying to guess where it would come out.

One of the children stopped and told me

"There's so much to see"

After enjoying dinner the children created swiss roll trains for dessert.

 

Story time included lots of  books and stories

about trains.

If you want to see more of OpaNanaLand

check out this video.

Gardening with Grandfriends

Last week we spent some time out doors with our grand friends.

It was on their patio

and we planted seeds in some of their big pots.

Together they prepped the soil 

opened and shared the seeds,

then poked and spread the seeds in the soil.

Then the fun part was watering the seeds.

It took a lot of water and the children were up to the chore.

We slid all the tubs to a sunny spot

and placed a sign that we had made at school.

The looks of happiness shared between the grand friends

and the children, with few words spoken, was wonderful.

Sharing an experience that is common for some

and new for others

but 

pleasurable for all.

Reading Our Own StoryWalk

Yesterday we went outside with our Big Buddies to enjoy

the StoryWalk that the children created last week.

While I was busy putting the pages up around the playground,

Ms Seymour re -read the story "I Went Walking".

For such a simple story it amazes me how much the children enjoy it.

Then they were out and running around the school yard.

I loved how the little buddies challenged the big buddies to run

from page to page.

I think the best thing about writing our own StoryWalk, for this large of 

a group,

is that it doesn't matter where you start or which way you go.

Just pick a page and go from there.

We didn't have the congestion of waiting to read each page, in order, 

that we experienced on previous StoryWalks.

It was fun when they found their own page,

or when they tried to think of a sound for the new animal.

What kind of a sound would a Sneaver make?

To finish the fun they ran around once again to collect our pages.

What other story could we write?

Writing Our Own StoryWalk

Last week we got together with our big buddies and decided to 

write our own StoryWalk.

We started with this book.

The book is about a child that goes for a walk and sees different animals

that end up following her.

 Ms Seymour read the book to the buddies.

She's great at reading books.  She draws the children in with voices, sounds,

questions and asking for predictions.

I created a story page for the buddies to fill in together.

 They had to each think of an animal then combine it to make a 

new animal with a new name.

Some animal combinations that they created were...

cow + bunny = bow

snail + beaver = sneaver

giraffe + snail = gerfidale

elephant + pig = elipig

cow + horse = coworse

whale + pigeon = wigen

duck + cat+ butterfly = ducatfly

cat + monkey = catonkey

Next week we will do a StoryWalk and follow this story around the playground.