Spalsh and drop and swirl

We started off our week with some friends still away and we hope that they will be well enough to come back before the end of this week. It is so cold outside and we were so busy working and playing inside that we didn’t go to the park. Brrrrrr! We think that this weather is good for polar bears and penguins.

Downstairs, we are almost finished making our second canvas. Our teachers have been humming and haa’ing about what to do on the painting and today we put some green paint on using stencils. Shelley also put some paint on her finger when she was cleaning the tube and she end up painting some lines with her finger. She and Sabine and Liezel were talking about bringing it together so that it doesn’t look like it is made up of parts………even though it is.

 Upstairs we put some orangey red coloured paint onto their Jackson Pollock style painting. We put the paint on so carefully with spoons, trying to make our own designs and swirls. We made lots of drips and splashes too. When we had finished our painting we went for a walk in the neighbourhood to see the decorations that are in shop windows and other parts Azabu Juban. We love seeing the lights twinkling in the night but in the day time they do no twinkle. This is similar to stars; we do not see them in the day time but we do see them up in the sky at night. We walked around and saw many beautiful decorations including Christmas trees with sparkly things hanging from the branches. When we returned to our classroom we started decorating the room with sparkly things too. We chose what we wanted to use for the decorations and our teachers helped hang them up from the ceiling and the walls.

Oliver made a heart for Shoko’s birthday party which we will celebrate next week. Margo and Nico are really patient and love doing detailed work. They spent time colouring in their M. C. Escher style art works for one of our canvasses. They also chose where they wanted to have them placed on the canvas. Story time was in keeping with our theme upstairs which is completing our animal theme and moving onto travel and holidays. We read “Mr. Small’s holiday” and “Clifford celebrates the year”. In the story with Clifford, he helps Santa Claus with the presents. At the one activity table, we decorated a star made from five paddle pop sticks. We chose which one we wanted to make and we chose five coloured sticks for it. We then had a selection of materials to use to decorate them with. We had gold and silver paint, sparkly shapes, jewels and glue.

Downstairs we continued working on our individual contemporary art paintings. We used some left over paper from our sweet potato digging collage. We had scissors and could cut the paper and then paste pieces onto our paintings. We are all learning how to manipulate a pair of scissors and keep our thumb looking up at the ceiling. We learnt that we can turn the paper when we are cutting rather than twist our hands. We will work on these artworks throughout the week and then paste them in our workbooks/portfolios representing our art projects which we did while making the canvasses.

 We sat together with our teachers on the mat and sang some new songs. We sang our “Hello” song and Shelley didn’t sing her name very nicely. Her voice was much too quiet and she realized that it was better to sing with a big voice. We sang “Five little leaves” and Sabine took one off the wall as we sang about each leaf. We blew them all down and saw that there were five leaves lying on the ground. Then we sang some new songs about a clown and animals. The one was a finger play called “This little clown” and the others were in relation to the animal puppets. There were five animal puppets viz. a frog, a bear, a giraffe, a koala and an elephant. The songs that we learnt today were “Poor old Gerry Giraffe”; “One little speckled frog”; “I know a teddy bear”; “If you should meet an elephant” and unfortunately Shelley didn’t know a song about a koala. Then all the animals went to sleep and we went to have lunch.

We hope that all of our friends and families stay warm this afternoon.

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