Parts of a whole

Every day this week, the weather has been so beautiful. Sometimes we have not even needed to wear a long sleeve shirt. Today was one of those days. The warmth of the sun shone down on us and we collected leaves and played with our friends and teachers. We have been doing a lot of running and hiding lately which we love so much. Our teachers count to 20 and then we run and hide. They have to look for us and then when they find us we run away from them and they chase us and catch us! They are such fast runners; we just cannot get away from them. Kana is especially fast and she always discovers our hiding places. We had some new activities on the second floor today. During our circle time we spoke about the different parts that are on our faces. We have two eyes; two ears; one nose; one mouth; two lips; two eyebrows; eyelashes and hair. Shelley told us that when we feel eyelashes touching our skin, this is what it feels like to get a butterfly kiss. She then explained to us that the whole thing is our face and all the things that go on our faces are parts of it. She showed us some cards with photos of things on them e.g. telephone, broom, Lego board, puzzle etc. She also had some smaller photos that were of parts of these photos. We then had to match the smaller cards with the bigger ones and see what part belonged to which whole. We were so good at this game, she took more cards out. We love being challenged and even little Tokutaro could match one of them. We played with paper clay and then did leaf rubbing. We looked at leaves and felt them; one side feels smooth and the other side feels bumpy. We put them bumpy side up on the table, placed our paper on top of it and rubbed wax crayons over the paper. We were amazed to see the shape of the leaf appearing on our paper. When we were in the park, we collected leaves, stones, twigs and feathers for our sensory boxes.

We were amazed upstairs to see how long the green vine grew that we pulled out from under the pot. It is a magic bean so maybe that’s why it grew so tall. Darren stood on a chair and it went all the way up to the ceiling and beyond. This is what happened in the story “In Wibbly’s garden”. Afterwards we spoke about other things that we find in a garden e. g. snail, beetle, ladybug, caterpillar which are things that we remember came from the book. We played the bugs dominoes game on the mat during circle time. The vocabulary we used today was related to insects. The words were grasshopper, bee, butterfly, beetle, spider and ant.

Kana did an activity with us using pine cones. She told us that they can become owls and we of course were not so sure about this. How can a pinecone become an owl? We will tell you. First you take a pinecone; then you find some beautiful coloured feathers and you paste them onto the pinecone. Then you look for big googly eyes and you attach these to the pinecone and bingo……………you have a cute little owl. We took some papers that we have been keeping as scrap paper since the school year started and we put it in a bucket with water. We mulched it all together and will leave it over the weekend to soak into the paper. We are not sure what we will do with it, but have a funny feeling that we may use it like play dough or clay. It will be a different texture and we used different colours of green and white paper so maybe we will make something relating to nature and leaves from it. Wishing you all a great weekend and we hope that our sick friends will all be better and will come to school on Monday.

Love Shelley, Darren, Goh and Kanako