Can plants really grow out of our ears?!
We always thought that if it is a sunny spring day, it is warm. However today it was the opposite. It was a lovely sunny day but it was not warm at all. We sat in sunny spots in the park so that we could keep warm but actually, we don’t really worry about weather like our teachers and parents do. They feel the cold more than we do and we just want to play and do what we do best! And this is what we did today.
We started off the morning playing with food in the dress up corner and we laid the table with plates and bowls and cups etc. We then filled the plates with food and left the table and went to play with Kinex and the plastic coloured cups that we use for sorting things. Our teachers think that we are so predictable as we go for the same toys and accessories on a regular basis. There are things that we love to play with and they have endless possibilities; that is why we choose the same things almost every day; and we think that there is nothing wrong with sameness……change can come so suddenly and don’t we all know this!
In these two photos you may notice that Ren has a different coloured T-shirt on. Well the one on the right was taken yesterday and we forgot to tell you that we listened to a story on the CD and followed the words in a book. Here we are sitting together on the piano stool.
Our activity at the table took a long time and we were all able to concentrate and persevere at the tasks that we were given to do. We followed on from our activity that we did yesterday and Sui did hers today. While we are learning about growth, new beginnings and spring, we are also learning the concepts “above and below” which is one of the elements of this activity. All three of us folded our paper over so that we were only working on the green part. Shelley drew two dots for each of us; they were different distances apart. This exercise was all about vertical lines. When you write English you always write from top to bottom so this was a fine motor activity preparing us for this eventuality. We joined the dots all along our pages and they became the stalks or stems of our plants. Then we took punches that make different shapes e.g. leaves, flowers, butterflies etc and we pasted these along the stalks or stems. We wanted to make the shapes and we needed a lot of strength for this as you have to push really hard. We used different colours of origami paper and at the end we unfolded the pages and saw that the brown part was the part representing below the ground and the green part was the part representing above the ground. We will talk more about things that live under the ground and things that are above the ground. We will put the pictures on the wall at the entrance to our room when we are finished making them.
This morning a lady from Japan Today came to talk to Shelley and she took a photo of us. She is writing an article about Shelley and Ohana and we will tell everyone when they can see it on the computer.
We read books during library time and particularly love looking at the book about the boy who had a plant growing out of his ear. His mummy said that it would happen if he didn’t clean his ears properly. We think that sometimes mums and big people make up stories, just so that we do the things that we don’t want to do! Today is Wednesday and it is a cold spring day. We think that some of our friends may be coming back to Ohana soon and we are really excited about this. Tomorrow Noah will be with us as he changed his day from Wednesday to Thursday. Wishing you all a good afternoon and stay warm and snug like a bug in a rug.
Love Shelley and Darren