Drops of paint and water

“Hello everybody let’s clap our hands, and say good morning to our friends”. This is the song where we sing “good morning” in different languages. The languages we learnt have been English, Japanese, Spanish, Afrikaans, Norwegian, French and Chinese. We sang a few songs just before we began doing our water activity and also spent time in the park with some new bubble making toys. We started off our day by going outside early as it was going to be another hot day in Tokyo. We hope that the people up north have enough water and can keep cool wherever they are. We were lucky to play in the shade of the Cherry Blossom tree and fill our buckets with water. Our new bubble toys were a bubble wand that you dip into bubble mixture and then wave it in the air; the second one has a wheel inside and you have to blow to make the bubbles and the third one has a winder and you have to wind and push a button on top and the bubbles come out in their hundreds. We tried to make them work and had the most success with the bubble wand. We had fun sliding down the roller slide with Shelley and held on tightly to one another so that we could all go really fast. We also had a picnic in the shade which was fun and then we played a little longer and returned to school to keep cool and do some activities.

When we returned to school we had time to play on the carpet and choose what we wanted to do. Ashling and Sui chose the dinosaur puzzles which are quite difficult and they did a great job with them. Finn and Renshi spent time joining the train tracks together and playing with the trains. Afterwards we went to the activity table and learnt something else about water and what happens when we drop paint in it. Earlier in the week when we made our aquariums we noticed the blue colouring spreading through the water in the bottle, making it blue. Well today was a different activity from that one and this is what we used. We had a piece of white paper in front of us; eight plastic spoons; eight containers with paint inside them; five sponges and two flight bowls with water in them.

We dipped our sponges in the water and covered our pages with water. It was quite difficult because we couldn’t really see anything different on the paper. It was still white and we had to look carefully to see that we had covered it entirely with water. Then we took a container with colour in it and dropped some paint on our paper. We noticed that the minute that it touched the water, the colour seemed to spread out on the page. We made some amazing patterns and Sui did something really different. She dropped some paint inside another colour that was already on the page and it looked really beautiful. We took photos of all of our pictures. Finn is blowing on his painting to see if he can make more patterns.

We spent some time relaxing in the library and Shelley read two books to us. We listened to the story called “If you give a mouse a cupcake” and “The Cat Family’s busy day”. We were wondering what a mouse would do if we gave it a cupcake and then we found out when we read the story. The mouse wanted to put sprinkles on it and then he made a big mess and then he wanted to swim because he was so hot and phew, there were so many things that he wanted to do as a result of being given the cupcake. If we were given a cupcake, we would want to decorate it and then of course, eat it! The second story was about the cat family and their lives; where they live, what they do and where they were going that day. They were on the way to the airport to pick up grandma who was coming for a holiday. Many of us are going on holidays soon as it is summer vacation time. We are also going to go to the airport and fly on an airplane. We noticed in the book that there was a luggage truck, a gasoline truck and many different people (in this book they were cats) working at the airport.

We want to remind everything to drink, drink and drink lots of water on these hot sunny days. See you tomorrow for our last day of summer school!

Love Shelley and Darren