Spinning a web

We welcomed Tokutaro back to school today after he and his family spent a few days in the cool, clean air of Hokkaido. He spent a beautiful time in the mountains seeing trees filled with the orange, red, brown and golden colours of Fall/Autumn. He and Eva made leaves for our sweet potato mural which is on the wall as you enter our classroom. We dipped the leaves into some green paint after we had mixed it and when they are dry, we will attach them to the vine. Our mural will evolve over a few days as we need to make worms and things that belong under the ground as well as think about what there is above the ground. Please come and have a look as it has many photographs of all of us enjoying the day out together (thanks Carolin). We made a vine with yarn and Kana attached our sweet potatoes to it. They are displayed on brown paper which represents the soil where we found them. Kana made this beautiful mural for us so that we can think about the day and learn more from the experience when we are at school.

We did music and movement that included jumping, walking, hiding and curling up into a ball, swaying, lifting our arms up into the air and touching the ground and then resting quietly on the mat. We sang our “Hello” song and today Eva sang “My name is Eva” and Tokutaro sang his name in his own words using the correct tune. Our teachers are noticing how we are developing each day; how many new words we know; which words of songs we remember and most importantly, how happy we are! We did two more activities today. One of them was an activity that some of our friends already did earlier in the week which was a red collage. We will do different coloured collages focusing on one colour at a time to try to reinforce colour recognition. The second activity was with play dough and the accessories that our teachers gave us today were creatures from under the sea. We learnt many new words e.g. fish, sea horse, shell, coral, shark, whale, ray etc.

We were happy to have snack time together with all of our friends this morning. Nico, Finn and Oliver came downstairs to eat with us. Thanks for coming guys!

Finn, Nico and Oliver cut out more leaves for their vines and glued them onto the group picture that they are making. We did another activity at the table which was connected to Halloween. Soon we will be dressing up and having a fun time for Halloween and are leading up to it, with many different things. We read the story “Halloween is” and Darren asked us the question: “What can you see in the picture?” Oliver said: “A Jack-o-Lantern”; Nico said: “The moon and leaves” and Finn said: “A spider. A spider has eight legs and I can see a black cat”. Then he asked us another question: “What can we see when it is Halloween?” Oliver said: “A ghost; a witch”; Finn said: “A dragon; a skeleton” and Nico said: “A moon and bats”. We then made a spider’s web on the table. This was quite an intricate thing to do as we had to do a lot of co-operating with our friends. We had to pass the ball of wool/yarn to someone standing on the opposite side of the table and then the third person would tape it onto the table. When we were finished making our web, we took “Sidney the Spider” and played with it on the web. We had a great time and it was a wonderful learning experience for all of us; sharing and working together.

Love Shelley, Darren and Kanako