Cherry blossoms galore

We realized when we were doing our calendar this morning that today is the last day of March. The year is truly marching on! Tomorrow will be a new month and it is called April. Michaela is the only friend in our class who is having a birthday in April and she has already chosen the day when we will celebrate with her in Petals Class. We also had our last day with Mika as one of our classmates in Petals Class. She is going to Yochien full time from next week and while we were sad that it is her last day, we will still see her next week when we have an official farewell party for her and Vincent. You can see from the photos that we had a lot of fun outside, under the cherry blossom trees and in the warm sunshine. Today was another beautiful warm day and we collected a few more cherry blossoms to take back to school.

Our one activity this morning was making a cherry blossom picture using real cherry blossoms, leaves and a few petals. We collected them yesterday when we were in the park and we pressed them over night so that they were flat and easy to use. We each had a piece of contact which is very, very sticky and we pasted the leaves, cherry blossoms and petals onto the contact. Some of our fingers got stuck on the contact and we laughed as we tried to pull them off. We had to work out how to remove our fingers without getting our other hand stuck.

At our second activity table, we all drew our own personal documentation pictures from our science experiment using water, colouring and coffee filters. We drew the four cups with lines on them and two coffee filters; one wet one and one dry one. We felt them both before we drew them and we thought that the wet one was also cold. The dry one was not cold at all. We looked at the cups carefully and made the shapes and lines in our own unique way. Afterwards most of us drew our names on the top left hand corner of the page.

We will put them into our workbooks together with the documentation that is on the wall in our classroom.

Our story today was one of our favourites and one that we love listening to, over and over. Since we are learning about insects this month, this story fitted the theme perfectly. Some of the words we know and can repeat when our teachers turn the page e. g. “he was still hungry”. While we read the story we made sounds as if we were caterpillars eating just like “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. When the caterpillar turned into a butterfly we all flew to wash our hands for snack time.

We are taking more responsibility in our classroom at the moment as we keep on telling our teachers that we can do things by ourselves; we can be the teachers etc. They smile when we say these things and feel so proud of us inside their bodies. We know this, and can see it and feel it from them.

During the morning we sang “There are seven days in a week” and we asked Shelley again, to sing us the song about the “Two little bees” and their pom poms. Hisami sang us a song about “sakura” which is the Japanese name for cherry blossoms.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel