Our robot

We are so lucky that our teachers take so much time to think about things for us to do and how to do them. Today when we went to the park, we all went underneath the large cherry blossom tree and played there so that we could be out of the sun. But we really like playing with the sand in the sandbox so what could we do? Well today the sand came to us instead of us going to the sandbox! Shelley filled some containers a few times and we poured it out of the containers right where we were sitting. We also played with water today and went backwards and forwards, collecting water and pouring it out onto the sand. We were so happy as we met Maddie in the park which was a big surprise for her and she wasn’t sure what to do. We invited her to come and play with us as we like to share with everyone and Shelley told her that it was okay for her to play with us even though she was at her other school today. Many of her friends from her other school came to play with us in the shade of the cherry blossom tree. It was the best place to play in the park today. In this photo here Ashling is opening up a present that we all got from our friends at the Oceanside Middle School in New York when they sent us the paper crane display. They made bracelets for us and we love them. They are made with sparkly jewels like diamonds. This morning when we arrived at school some of us enjoyed playing in our boxes again. We will take them home today if our moms collect us by car as they are too big to go on a bicycle. We had fun with them and will surely have more fun at home playing with our families and the boxes. We played with toys on the mat for a shorter free play time as we wanted to go outside early because of the heat that was predicted by the weather man. Today was 33 degrees Celsius. Phew! After free play time we went to one of our activity tables and used some junk art materials and made a picture with both drawing and pasting. We used plastic containers, coloured foam shapes and markers. Our finished products are still wet so we will leave them at school over the weekend and then take them home on Monday.

Our really big project which was the last one of our “Cool Construction” theme was to create a person/robot using parts from old machines. All of these parts come from old DVD players, TV’s, music centers, portable cassette machines, remote controls etc. We chose different parts to represent the different parts of the body. First one of us chose a part for the head, then two eyes, a nose and a mouth. Next came the neck, chest, stomach, and the arms and legs in three parts. We have bones that join parts of our bodies onto one another so Darren wanted us to learn about this; that there are three parts to our arms; the upper arm, the lower arm and the hand. This is the same for our legs. There were some really big parts and some smaller ones and the really small ones became the fingers. Darren attached all the parts to a large piece of cardboard and Finn and Renshi were going to add a few more details while some of us were resting downstairs. We packed away all the bits into a large plastic container which stays on the balcony and is sealed so everything stays dry inside it.

We read books in the library and while we like looking at books by ourselves, we also like our teachers to read them to us. Ashling wanted Shelley to read “Periwinkle goes to school” which was very good for us to read because some of us have the exact same feelings when we start a new school. The second book was the same one that we had read yesterday called “Whose making that noise”? Then she read “Brown Bear” to herself and she remembered all the words and read it just as if she was a teacher! Renshi chose “I like” which is all about things that we like about one another; Finn joined us and listened to the stories that we had chosen and afterwards he wanted to look at them by himself. Sui read a few books by herself and we all felt a lot cooler when we were sitting in the library as the wind was blowing through the door and the window.

We hope that everyone has a great weekend and stays cool in this hot weather.

Love Shelley and Darren