Making our own aquariums

Phew! It was a hot day today and we spent a fun time outside playing with water and bubbles. We took our special table outside that has four holes in it. We took four buckets that fit inside the holes with us, together with bubbles and some bubble wands and bubble blowers. We filled two buckets with water and two buckets with bubble mixture so we could play with both bubbles and water if we wanted to. It was such fun playing with the buckets in the shade and even though we had water play here, some of us still went to fill up some bottles at the tap. Our teachers say that we are creatures of habit and like to do the same things over and over and this is the best way for us to learn. Inside we kept a lot cooler and spent the morning playing on the mat and doing activities. At the office table some of us did drawing and origami and cutting while the rest of us played with the coloured balls and packed away the toys that our friends had washed yesterday. Renshi noticed that there are some new cars in the transport container and he was surprised to see this. Finn wanted to play with the helicopter but we told him that it is being fixed because parts of us are broken. We had a chat about taking care of other people’s things and of course our own things as well. In the same way that our teachers teach us to respect one another and value our differences we have to respect toys and things. We had a picnic snack on the mat and combined sitting together with a morning circle time and singing. We sang our “Hello” song and some other morning songs with actions. Just before we sang our snack time song we sang a fun song that tells us to creep our hands up our bodies all the way to the sky as we raise our hands before we sing the snack time song. After snack time we went to the table and we were all so happy that Shoko was happy too and participated with us in our activity. This was our special activity for today and it was all about water. We each had a bottle and when we looked through the bottles we could see one another. We remembered that we had learnt the word “transparent” yesterday; and now we knew that bottles are also transparent. Darren had a selection of things for us to put inside our bottles. Some of the things floated and some of the things sank. We were making our very own aquariums. We put beads, the lids of old markers, foam, stars, sparkles and glitter inside our bottles. They were all sitting at the bottom of our bottles. Then Darren put some drops of blue powder into a jug of water and the water changed colour; it became blue just like the ocean. The mouth of our bottles was too small for us to pour the water in so we used a funnel. We poured the blue water into our bottles and then twisted the caps on really tightly so that they would not leak. Our teachers helped us put tape on the caps as well, so that we were doubly sure that the water would not leak. We saw all the things dancing around in the water and are so happy to have our very own aquariums to take home. We were wondering if we put a real fish inside our aquariums, what would happen?

At the end of today we will say goodbye to Maddie as today is her last day of Summer School and because it is her last day we posted some pictures of her enjoying her peanut butter snack. Do you think that she likes peanut butter? We think she does. Thanks for coming to Ohana Maddie. We loved having you at our school and will miss you. Even though today was Shoko's last day of  summer school, we are happy that she will be back for the start of the new school year in August. Aiden, Darren’s big son came to school today and had a fun time with us. He is bigger than we are and helped us with many things during the day. Thanks for a great day everyone!

Love Shelley and Darren