Water for our Triops!

We were happy to see Hisami return to school today after feeling unwell and many of us gave her a big smile and a hug today. In the morning, we saw the wonderful water paintings we created yesterday with our friends and they had all dried. In the middle of the table were lots of paint stamps and red, blue, yellow and green paint. All of the creatures and plants on the stamps need water or live in the water. We could choose which stamps we wanted to use and then carefully pressed it into the tray with the foam and paint in it. We then pressed them onto the water painting we did yesterday and counted to 5 before removing the stamps carefully. This was lots of fun and our pictures looked really nice. On the carpet area many of us enjoyed using the play telescopes and pirate dress up costumes with the hats. We also saw the floor road carpet and soon had many toy cars and other vehicles parked up on it. On the small table there was some fake grass with lots of farm animals. Later when we decided to play with the ocean animals we realized we needed to sort them back into 2 boxes; one for farm animals and the other for ocean creatures. We knew it was going to be a warm day and the teachers told us we should get to the park early to avoid the heat. We packed away the toys and art materials super quickly and got ready for our yummy snacks. Many of us can now apply sunscreen and bug-spray with only a little help from the teachers. We grabbed our water bottles on the way to the park and hada great time running, playing in the sand-box and using the big slide. Darren had a spray water bottle which he used to keep us cool and it was funny feeling the cold water mist blowing in the air. Once we came back from the park and changed into our indoor shoes we made a big circle and talked about how we are hot and sweating. Darren then asked “What is sweat”? And we answered “Water”. But the water from our bodies such as sweat and tears is different from the water in our water bottles and has salt in it just like in the ocean! Many of us told us we had swam in the ocean or the pool and the water tasted funny! Several of us had said that we had swum under the water before too and everything looked blue. We wore goggles to see under the water and then with Natalie half of us moved to the big table to make some special underwater blue goggles. We firstly got 2 small pieces of blue Cellophane or 1 big piece of Cellophane and using the sticky tape we taped it to some colorful masks. When we put the masks on we saw that everything looked blue just like underwater. On the second table we saw some glass and plastic containers and started by talking all about all living things needing water like cats, dogs, people, snakes and trees. The teachers then showed us some little dried bits in a bag called Triops. They can survive for a long time without water and so we put some into the water and hope they start to come alive soon. We then swapped groups and while half of us were bringing the Trips alive the second half of us were making our underwater goggles! We learnt a lot today and had lots of fun too. We are looking forward to tomorrow!

Have a great afternoon,

Love,

Darren, Hisami, Natalie and Yuhei