Planting seeds

It was so beautiful outside today that many of us went to the park without our jackets. We ran around and loved feeling the warm sunshine on our bodies. At last! Downstairs we had a small class because Isabelle and Emily went upstairs. They spent the day with their friends on the third floor and had an exciting time learning about and planting seeds.

Upstairs we dramatized planting seeds; making tour arms into a circle shape like the sun; dancing our fingers like the rain and jumping up as high as we could as if we were a tall flower that grew really big.

We had a long discussion following on from the question “What do we know that grows big?” We were not sure what to answer in the beginning so we all had an opportunity to look at books in the library and these are the answers that we came up with:

Isabelle: Beans

Oliver: Babies, triceratops, cow, horse

Jamie: Dragons and dinosaurs

Nico: Caterpillar

Beckett: Balloons

Emily: A girl

Darren showed us lots of little seeds in different packets. Some were loose and some were laminated. We looked at them carefully and compared their sizes. Some were really tiny and some were still small but bigger than the tiny ones. We then looked at the ones in the packets and could work out which were sunflowers, cosmos and green peas. We also had some apple seeds but didn’t know what they were. So Darren took a whole apple, he cut it in half and we looked inside. Wow, we saw the same seeds so then we knew that the last group of seeds was apple.

When we went to the park, we collected stones and small rocks to put at the bottom of our containers. We learnt that the reason why we put the stones and rocks at the bottom of the pot is so that the soil can have some drainage.

Downstairs we threaded beads onto laces and string and our teachers were really sensible as we each had our own bowl and string so that we didn’t have to share. We also played with Lego on the mat and spent time cooking, doing puzzles and playing with the dolls. We sat down for morning circle time on the floor near the “waiting seat”. We all put our legs out straight in front of us and played a game naming different parts of our bodies. Shelley would say: “Where are your eyes?” to one of us. Then she would say: “Where are Eva’s eyes?” and one of us would go to Eva and touch her eyes gently. We played this game naming many different parts of our bodies e.g. ears, cheeks, tummy, shoulders, mouth, nose and hands. We sang “Heads and shoulders” and then our ‘Hello’ song. Some of us had a turn to ask someone all by ourselves: ‘What is your name?’ and Marie said that it made her heart feel so beautiful to listen to us singing by ourselves. We laughed a lot when Shelley lifted us in the air with her arms or legs. We felt like we “flying” in the air.

Love Shelley, Darren, Goh, Marie and Kana