So long, farewell.......Vincent and Mika chan

We loved the rain today as it meant that we stayed inside the whole day and we could wear our dress up costumes throughout the day. We had princesses, an astronaut and many of us wore head gear. You can see from the one picture we are making our tongues into different shapes. We were talking about bees and their tongues that are like a straw, so that they can drink nectar from flowers. This week we have learnt some interesting facts about bees, insects, butterflies and we have also contributed our thoughts about them. We re-read the “Honeybee and the Robber” for our story today and while we really enjoy looking at the pop up creatures and the things that move in the story, we are fascinated by how bees make honey and what goes on inside the bee hive. We will continue talking about them and observe things in our amazing books that we have in our library about bees, flowers and butterflies. Some of the pages in these books are plastic and you can see through them. We can see wonderful photographs when we turn the pages so we are looking at exactly how they look in real life. We had one numeracy game where our task was to choose a number, and then count the number of beads on the abacus so that they matched the number symbol that we had chosen. Then we looked for another number that matched. We had numbers going from one all the way up to ten. We made a picnic on the floor and are enjoying playing with the four white owls which our friends in Buds Class gave to us. At the one activity table we looked at pictures of caterpillars and we also looked at the one plastic caterpillar that we have in our insect box. We saw that they have legs and our caterpillars don’t have any legs. We counted them but then noticed that some had more than others. We decided to make our caterpillar legs using paper and we could choose how many we wanted to make. We cut small pieces of paper and then with our fingers (and sometimes our teachers fingers), we put glue onto our caterpillars and attached the legs.

Michaela and Daiki painted black and yellow stripes on their pieces of paper and Koh chan and Michaela made their cherry blossom paintings. Later in the day, we worked a little more to complete our activities and then we used up the paint by painting the newspaper and having a fun sensory experience. Some of us put our hands in the paint and smoodged it around; it felt smooth and fun.

And then we had our farewell party. We welcomed Mayuko, Vincent’s mum, Mako, Mika’s mum, Maya, Mika’s sister, John, Vincent’s dad, Frank, Mika’s dad and Charlie, Vincent’s baby brother. Usually when we have lots of family members in our classroom, it is because there is a birthday but today was not a birthday. Did we have a cake? No. Did we have candles? No. Our table was completely empty so Vincent went a got some things to put onto the table. He brought the lid of a plastic container, a plastic bag with something inside and a small Ziploc bag with a few plastic bottle tops in it. We spoke about what you do when you are sad; cry, hug someone or make a sad face. We were not really sure what people do when they are sad. We know what people do when they are happy though. Then some of us went up to Vincent and Mika to give them hugs and our teachers said that they would miss them very much but were really happy that Mika would come on Tuesday’s for piano lessons and Vincent would come on Tuesdays for Phonics and Wednesdays for Numeracy. Yay! Mako san made delicious healthy oat bars with bananas and raisins inside them and Mayuko made cut skewers with pineapple, grapes and blueberries on them. The skewers were pink plastic with hearts on top of them. Vincent and Mika invited us all to the tables for snack time and we sang together and shared in a beautiful time with one another.

We made a book for them with our drawings inside, a placemat with all of our photos on it and we wrote words on it. If they use these placemats, they can still see all of us every single day. We gave them their workbooks/portfolios and their life books. We want to say to Vincent and Mika, we love you very much and will miss you in Petals Class. Please come back and say ‘hello’ to us whenever you can. We want to say a big thank you to Mako san and Mayuko san for their delicious snack.

“So long, farewell, aufwiedersehn, goodbye, we hate to go and leave this pretty sight”…………. Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel