Love is something if you give it away it will come right back to you

We love you! Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Today was a day filled with fun and love and of course, keeping warm in our classroom. We had fun on the carpet but during free play time we all sat together at the play dough table and worked and played together. We enjoy doing things together most of the time and sometimes we like to do things on our own; which our teachers say is absolutely fine. Sometimes big people say that they need “time out” and we think that maybe they have done something wrong, but it really means, quiet time. Today we had a wonderful music time with Kana. Most of us have not heard her play the piano and today we had a treat; she played for us. First the music told us to stand up; then we were butterflies flying around a beautiful garden. Sometimes we flew fast and sometimes we flew slowly and sometimes we stopped, and sat on a flower. Kana then asked us to make wiggly fingers in the air as she was going to let us play the piano too. We wiggled our fingers in the air and then one at a time, we came up to the piano and played the white keys. We loved making music ourselves and were curious about how the sounds came out when we pushed the keys. We played high notes on one end of the piano and low notes on the other end, where Kana was sitting. We learnt a song in Japanese called “Gu, choki, pa”. You made a fist with “gu”; make two fingers like a scissors for “choki” and make an open hand for “pa”. We copied Kana and made so many different things, just using our hands. Each of us had a turn to choose something; Miya chose a butterfly; Tokutaro chose a dog; Gento chose an airplane; Nico chose a car; Shelley chose a cake. We laughed and played together so happily. Then we played our favourite “Wiggles” CD and danced to “Hot Potato”; “The Monkey Dance”; “Shake your sillies out” and “Shaky Shaky”. We sang our “Hello” song and then went to the tables to do many different activities. Kana also taught us a song called ‘Love’ by the Wiggles. We made the four letters L, O, V, E with our bodies. The E was a little bit tricky as we had to balance on one leg and put our arms out at the same time. We said “I love you” to our friends using our words and actions and then we said it with only actions.  Each of us decorated two pink hearts using red, white and pink collage materials. We used tissue paper, small heart and other shapes, red hearts in both the negative and positive shapes, white heart shaped doilies and other pieces of paper in those same colours. Some of these hearts are now hanging in the doorway which looks so beautiful. Our classroom entrance is filled with love, draped on pink fabric.

We made “rose coloured glasses” using sparkly chopsticks and red cellophane. We had not finished making them by lunch time so some of us only had a photo taken wearing the frame. We will take photos with the red cellophane in all of our frames during the week and will post a photo of the entrance to our room on the website. You can also come and see it when you come to our classroom on the second floor. We read “The Rainbow Fish” and learnt how important it is to share. In the beginning the rainbow fish was beautiful but he had no friends because he didn’t share and wasn’t really kind. He learnt that it was more important to have friends than be beautiful.

Love Shelley, Kana and Darren