Aistear is our favourite part of the day in Room 3 and much of our early learning and development takes place through play and hands-on experiences. Aistear is based on a central theme and the activities are rotated daily so that each group will experience all the different learning opportunities. We have been learning about \’People and places in other parts of the world\’ and used the story “Handa’s Surprise” by Eileen Browne. The main character in the story is a girl called Handa who lives in Kenya, Handa decides to take a basket of fruit as a surprise present to her friend Akeyo but Handa gets a surprise herself when she reaches Akeyo. We really enjoyed learning about Kenya and we discussed the differences between Ireland and Kenya. We used puppets to retell the story, we drew and coloured the fruit in Handa\’s Basket, created playdough objects based on the story, made a story map and even made our own smoothies