Quiet Friday
Friday, February 13th, 2015
Yesterday our teachers had a fantastic Staff Day. There is a long posting about it on the website. If you look on your computer, the photos are the right way round but if you look on your iphone, many of the photos are the wrong way around. Our teachers are confused about this and are not sure what to do. We 
hope that all of our photos here are the right way round when the journal is sent to our families.
Today we had a small group of children playing together on the mat with the trains and our 3D neighbourhood. Our teachers want us to have time to bring closure to the project in our own way. We love playing with the cars and other transport in the neighbourhood and will chat about how we can bring things to an end next week, when more of our friends are in class. The only girls in our class today were our teachers however they are quite excited
because two new girls are joining our class from Monday so they will no longer be outnumbered. We are only joking about this because we know how much fun we have together no matter who is in the class. Today we played a number game with dice, similar to the one that we had on the table earlier this week. We each chose a cup and rolled the dice. When it stopped rolling, we counted the dots and then picked the matching number of counters from a container and placed them inside our cups. We did this for three rounds and then we counted the total number of counters in our cups. William B had 17, Shelley and Taiyo had 14, Manuel had 11, Luka had 8, Vincent had 5 and Daiki had 4. We worked out who had the most and who had the least. William B had the most and Daiki had the least. We loved this game and hope that we can do it using different counters next week.
At the activity tables, we made a traffic light for our pedestrian crossing pictures and William B drew a zebra for his zebra crossing. We used red, green and yellow circular shaped stickers for the traffic light and chose where we wanted them to go. Some of us knew that red is at the top, yellow is in the middle and green is at the bottom. Shelley sang this song to us:
“Green means go and yellow means slow and red means stop
Green means go and yellow means slow and red means stop.
When I go for a drive in my car, we can travel very far
When the light says red that means stop, ask any traffic cop.
Green means go and yellow means slow and red means stop
Green means go and yellow means slow and red means stop”
When she was singing she paused after “red means…..” and we shouted out stop without her even telling us to.
Hisami is planning for Hina Matsuri already and today we all covered a tissue box with red paper in preparation for this festival. We used tape and folded 
the paper around the box and then we wrote our names on it. We looked at our names on our flashcards and copied the letters. We also have new names and pictures of our faces on a flashcard. Our teachers will explain to us on Monday how to use these names. They are a part of something that Shelley saw when she visited Redlands school in Cremorne, Sydney.
Hisami read us a story called “The Seven Chinese Sisters”. There is another famous book called “The Seven Chinese Brothers” however this one was quite different. We are looking forward to next week when our parents and some of our teachers start teaching us about different countries around the world. This week we are doing Ukraine on Tuesday, Singapore and Chinese New 
Year on Wednesday and Japan on Friday. We want to wish all of our families, friends, teachers and everyone around the world, a happy Valentine’s Day. We hope that everyone has someone who loves them and cares for them, like we do.
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel