Love is something if you give it away

We can’t believe that we are already half way through February 2013and…………….our Mr.V is now two years old. Yes, downstairs, our friend Vincent turned two on Sunday and we will be celebrating tomorrow. He told us today that he is two! We hope that all of our friends and their families enjoyed the long weekend and that some of them, had fun in the snow somewhere in Japan. Today we were so happy that the snow melted quickly during the night so we were able to go outside and play in the park. It was so bright and sunny but the wind was like a knife through our jackets. We felt it when we were walking to the park and tried to walk quickly so that we could get there and run around to warm up.

During activity time, we were very busy at the tables. We had one table where we drew on large sheets of paper with oil pastels, which we have not used before. When you draw with them, they slide so smoothly over the paper and the colours are really bright. Because we had such a large piece of paper, we stood at the table while we did this activity. When we had finished drawing, we used pink and red paints and painted on the paper as well. Some of us covered our drawings and some of us painted around them. At the second activity table, we had pasting with glue sticks and punching heart shapes with the shape punch. We had materials in various shades of reds and pinks as these are the colours that traditionally symbolize love and Valentine’s Day which is tomorrow. We made a special gift for our families which we will take home today for them. We will try to keep them till tomorrow to give to them but our teachers are not sure if we will be able to wait so long; or remember this! Circle time was great fun as we sang and had a conversation about love; what does love mean; who do you love; why do you love them and more. The conversation will be up on the wall for everyone to read, tomorrow. We also learnt that you can communicate with people without speaking. We learnt how to say "I love you" with our hands.

We did an interesting experiment this morning. We put the sea creatures into water and then Shelley asked us what colour the ocean is. Tokutaro told her that it was blue so she asked him if he wanted to make blue water. He put a small spoon of food colouring into the water and it became blue. He and Vincent placed the sea creatures into the water and were staring at them for a long time.

Then Tokutaro took the dolphin out of the animal container and put it in the water. We want to say a big thank you to Olivia and her mum because they bought us a wonderful book as a gift from America. It is called “How do dinosaurs go to school?” It was such a fun story to read with our friends and teachers. Dinosaurs use indoor voices; they help their friends; they eat their own lunch. It seems as if they have the same rules as we do at our school.

Jamie and Nico made things using the KINEX pieces during free play time. Jamie used as many as he could until the entire construction reached the ceiling while Nico made an airplane. Sean is really good with letters and numbers and he chose to do the alphabet puzzle and then build the train set with Beckett in the library. After some time, Nico, Jamie and Miya started to cook and prepare food on the small table for breakfast. Even Miya’s favourite bunny rabbit was invited for breakfast. Ayaka also had breakfast with us. Our story upstairs was called “A Valentine for Tommy”. It was about Tommy receiving a hippo toy as a gift for Valentine’s Day.

At the activity table we learnt about a half and that you can make something into two equal parts and when you join the two parts together you get a whole. It sounds a bit complicated but it wasn’t. We wanted to fold our paper into half so that it could be a card for Valentine’s Day. In order to do this, we put the corners together and smoothed the edge down just like you do when you do origami. Then we took a sparkly pipe cleaner and folded it in half as well. We twisted the pipe cleaner into a heart shape which we attached to the front of our cards. We could choose to make one or two hearts using the pipe cleaners. Inside the hearts we drew pictures of the people who we love. On the cover of the card we wrote the words “I love you and on the inside of the card we wrote the words, “Happy Valentine’s Day”. We chose our mums, dads, brothers and sisters to be the recipients of our cards.

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