Friendly Friday

We have one more week of this term and it was lovely to end this one on a bright, sun shining day! We spent the morning working at the activity tables. We were really busy cutting out pictures for our workbooks/portfolios for International Month. We are planning what to put into our books from this wonderful learning experience, and have so many things to represent. We have Japan with origami Sumo and delicious onigiri; we have New Zealand with the All Blacks, rugby and Maori dances; we have Australia with kangaroos, koalas and vegemite; we have the Philippines with their jeepneys, toron and sunka; we have Venezuela with arepas, a warm climate and Angel Falls; we have Ukraine with beautiful Maryna, borscht and sunflowers……..We have one more Japanese cultural experience planned for next week and will add some photos from this into our collection. Today we cut out about 12 photos and we will paste them into our books next week. We carefully cut along the edges of the pictures and placed them inside our very own envelope. When we came to school this morning, we noticed the coffee filters from our colour experiment yesterday, had dried. The colours seemed a lot paler so we did our colour, coffee filter and water experiment again. This time our teachers put a thicker band of colour on the bottom of the filters. The result was that the colours spread all the way to the top of them and were a lot stronger. We observed that the colours went all the way to the top of the filters and stayed along the edge right at the top. The bottom part of most of them remained white. Our teachers recorded some of the comments that we made and will write them down and document it.

In the morning just before we went through our roll, we sang a song about people all around the world, saying “Hello” in their specific languages e. g.

“If I lived over in Australia

A place with kangaroos and koala

To welcome you I’d say ‘g’day mate’

But in Japan we say ‘konnichiwa’

But in Japan we say ‘konnichiwa’.

We sang about France, the Philippines, London, Venezuela and New Zealand.

After we did our roll, we got ready to go to the park. Every day we try to put our own jackets and smocks on; we can all do our shoes by ourselves and will always help our friends who are in need. This is just one of the many things that our teachers are encouraging us to do in order to develop our independence.

Another one of our activities this morning was white crayon and paint which we all called “Magic Painting”. Many of us already did this earlier in the week but today, Miyu, William B and Taiyo did their pictures. Miyu was fascinated when she painted over her name. Shelley wrote her name in white on the page so she couldn’t see it. Then she started painting and first she saw nothing and then she saw the letters appearing. And then she could read her whole name.

We read a book that was originally written in Japanese. It is called “A friend”. Shelley asked us about friends and what we think a friend is, but it was quite abstract for us. We see a friend as someone with a name, so we said “Koh is my friend” or “Hana is my friend” or “Taiyo is my friend”. Shelley tried to role play with us and she told us that she had a play date but she felt sad. She asked us if there was anything that we could do to make her feel better. Lanah said that we could kiss her. Shelley said that was a lovely thing to do. She asked us if we were feeling sad and a friend kissed us, if we would feel better. We said: “Yes”.

In the book that we read, it said that friends are there for one another in both good and bad times. We hope that our friends will be there for us in bad times!

We want to wish all of our friends a great weekend and see you on Monday!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel