Beginning of spring

In music today, we used our home made musical instruments that we made from recycled materials. We had drums made from boxes and tins, maracas made from bottles with things inside, shakers made from the lids of plastic bottles, a guitar made from a bowl and rubber bands, and a scraper musical instrument that we created from a large plastic bottle, a piece of string and spatula. We tried to play one instrument at a time to see how to play it and listen carefully to the sound that it makes. We played together loudly, quietly, fast, slow while singing together. We sang the “ABC song” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, little star”. Hisami taught us a song about a mouse coming out from its house, then two, three, four and five. She had little mice on the end of a straw and she used them for the song. We loved looking at them because they are so cute. We played some number games with them too e. g. there were five mice in their house, two went shopping and how many were left at home? During the morning we continued cutting and preparing to bring to closure our amazing theme called International Month. We have everything ready to paste into our books and will make one special page for Japan, one for Australia and we will group the rest of the countries that we learned about, on one page.

We made more musical instruments using recycled materials which we said earlier, we used in our orchestra during music time.

Today our science experiment was really interesting and Shelley has been trying to transcribe it from her iphone onto paper so that we can all have it in our portfolios, and our families can read about it in our classroom. It is really long and has many photos too so that everyone can understand what we did and see everything for themselves.

Today we did a few experiments as we wanted to see what happened when we did something slightly different with the coffee filters, water and colours.

We first drew on coffee filters making our colours as bright as possible. We could choose many colours or just one or even just a few. Then we poured some water into a little cup and placed our coffee filters into the cups. We noticed so many different things e. g. the coffee filters that had colours all the way to the bottom, when they were placed inside the water, the water changed colour and those that didn’t have any drawing on the bottom, the water stayed the same.

The next part of the experiment was pouring water into the large empty cups that we used yesterday. We drew a line on the side of each cup and poured water into them, all the way up to the lines. In all of our experiments we had a coffee filter inside the cups and we watched the water “melt, disappear and go up” so this time, we decided to just have liquid in the cups without a coffee filter. Our teachers want us to observe what happens to the liquid. Where does it go? Does the amount in the cups change or stay the same? We did a few more experiments as we wanted to keep on colouring coffee filters and then put them in cups with water.

Our story today was called “The very Lonely Firefly”. We listened attentively and looked at the illustrations of the firefly as it searched for other fireflies. Sadly, all the lights that it was attracted to were lights that people use e. g. lamps, flashlights, car headlights, candles and the eyes of animals in the night.

Eventually the firefly saw beautiful flickering lights and he knew that this must be his firefly friends and family. We loved seeing the lights flicker in the actual book. We want to say thank you to Vincent and his family for donating this book and two other beautiful ones for our library. Arigatou!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel