Animals and feely boxes

We thought so much about the fantastic day that we had yesterday for our school Sports Day. The weather was great, the company was great, the events were great; the food was great; everything was great! We forgot to thank our teachers for organising such a wonderful day for us and our families and we look forward to the next event which is our Sweet Potato Digging at the end of the month. Today the weather was a lot cooler and we were fortunate enough to have some time to play outside in the park. Some of us had long sleeved tops on, which is a sure sign that we are now in the season called autumn. This is the season when the leaves change colours and fall off the trees; and in America people call this time of year Fall which we think is because the leaves fall off the trees!

   Upstairs we used the light table to trace pictures. We had three kinds of pictures of animals that live in the jungle; we had snakes, lizards and parrots. We used special coloured paper that looked exactly like snake skin and feathers. We traced around the edges of animal shapes and then carefully removed them from the light box. Our teachers helped us cut out the shapes of the animals and we glued on wiggly eyes to make them look like real animals. We will paste them onto our large jungle background later in the week. We like to give all of our class mates the opportunity to do the same activities as we do and then we will put them all onto the background.

In the library we looked at the funny book that we have read a few times called “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly”. It is an interesting book not only because of the story but also because of the design of the pages and the art work. On each page there is a hole that starts off small and then gets bigger as the old lady swallows more and more animals. We have memorised parts of the story and completed the sentences when Darren was reading to us. Darren asked us: “Why did the lady swallow the bird?” Shoko answered: “She swallowed the bird to catch the spider”.

During our circle we played an English and Japanese game with the jungle animals.  Ayaka told us how to say the names of many of the animals that live in the jungle e.g. monkey – saru; gorilla – gorilla; snake – hebi; tree – ki. We mixed the 3D toys and Ayaka asked us to come forward and match the animal with the word that she said. Ayaka said: “Hebi” and then Nico chose the snake. At the activity table we painted a jungle scene with some of the animals we like in it. Nico painted a beautiful monkey; FJ painted a tiger; Jenny painted a gorilla; Nic painted a butterfly and Shoko painted a gorilla and butterfly.

 Downstairs we sang our song ‘What are your hands for?” and focused on our hands and what they can do. We usually sing that our hands are for clapping and Shelley asked us a few times through singing the song, what else our hands are for. We said touching toys, washing, holding hands, holding spoons for eating and Shelley also said that hands are for massaging. We sat together like a train and massaged our friends while she sang the massage song. We looked inside a container and saw many different textured things. We had felt, fur, newspaper, sandpaper, tissue paper, a white board and regular paper. Some of the things felt smooth and some felt rough. The sandpaper was the roughest texture of them all. We are in the process of making a feely box which is covered in many different textures and colours. We will use the box to learn more about textures and how we can use our hands to understand what something is, rather than our eyes.

We read the story “Don’t wake up mama!” which is about monkeys making a cake for the mums birthday. They did this while she was sleeping and tried not to wake her up so that she would get a surprise. We also noticed that the plastic container that used to have leaves and a caterpillar in it was empty. Shelley asked us what had happened to the caterpillar and we said that it was gone. We were not sure where it had gone to.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh and Christine.