Welcome back Arata

Today we welcomed Arata back to Flowers Class. Arata has been away in Hanoi for the last month and he looked genuinely excited to be back. Many of his friends came over from the carpet area to greet him and give him high fives and say hello to him. Adam came to the table and completed his special Mother’s Day gift this morning and really took his time and did a good job. On the main table we saw the pieces for the giant crocodile ready to be attached to the body. There were lots of egg box pieces to be glued onto the legs, body and tail and so we used the glue gun with the teachers help to attach them all. Once the pieces had set we got some green tissue paper and some runny glue. We used paintbrushes with the glue to attach the tissue paper to the body of the crocodile. Sharee showed us how we could tear the tissue paper into big strips if we held the paper sideways and then push the tissue paper into the bumps to make it stick. We managed to cover quite a lot of the crocodile’s body with the tissue paper and will continue with it tomorrow morning. On the second table there were lots of toy fish lined up on the table. We got to choose a fish and then chose the matching origami paper. We drew the shape of the fish on the back of the paper and cut out the shape. We then got some further pieces of origami to add the details such as spots, stripes and eyes to our origami collage. On the carpet area Eito tried out the bamboo elephant’s feet toys and the giant snake we made for part of the jungle scene. Tokutaro and Kosei set up the pieces to play chess. We know Kosei and Tokutaro are good players and when their friends wanted to play too they helped them with the moves. Wes enjoyed playing with the toy cars and fire trucks on the play mat while Riko and Gaby spent their time looking at their own life books. We did a short circle time before the park today to talk a little bit about taking care with the toys and books in the classroom as Darren had found 3 broken toys which had been put way. We need to be careful with the toys. We also had a quick chat about using English in the classroom and how there are some times, when we do the calendar for example, that we use Japanese too. When we are just talking to our friends we need to use English. The park was quite warm and it was great to see so many of us playing ‘Tag’ today. We made sure we took a water break as we were quickly hot and sticky. When we came back to the classroom we did some phonics work with our friends. We sat in a circle and thought of lots of words that start with S, A, T, I, P and N. We then started to make some words on the carpet using the wooden letters. The vowels are all blue while the consonants are all red. Together with our friends we made the words for pan, pin and pen on the carpet. We will try some more letters and words after our quiet time today. Have a great afternoon