Feathered hands

We are so lucky with the weather each day when we come to school. We have glorious sunshine, warm weather and precious time with our friends and teachers. Today we did a lot of running and chasing. We chased our teachers and they chased us and Sophie, Miya, Tokutaro and Shoko had a great time sliding together down the roller slide. We are also learning how to play “hide and seek”. We think that if we cover our eyes and can’t see anyone, that they can’t see us either. This is what we sometimes call hiding. Downstairs we often curl up into a ball on the carpet when Shelley says “hide”! We love these kinds of “hiding” games. We did so much learning today and we hope that we have enough space in this journal to share everything about our day. We focused on “circles” in our morning circle time with Shelley and had to look around the room and see if we could find things that were round like a circle shape. Shoko found the spots on the ladybug; Miya found the circles on the basket that holds our school T-shirts; Tokutaro found the puzzle with coloured circles in it and Sophie found the wheels on the bus on one of our books in the library. Even when we had completed our learning time during our morning circle, we still noticed many things in our classroom that were circular shapes.

We sat down at the activity table and did three different activities. The first activity was leaf rubbing as Shoko had missed out on doing it last week. We sat with her and did some more leaf rubbing pictures which are in our art folders. The second activity followed on from a discussion that we had during our circle time. Shelley showed us a picture of an owl and explained to us that owls are birds that wake up when we go to sleep and sleep when we wake up. They say “Toowit toowoo”. We all tried to make an owl sound. We looked at a picture of an owl and saw that instead of arms, like all birds it has wings. We listened to music and then flew like owls with our large wings fluttering. Afterwards we went to the activity table and traced our hands on coloured paper. We coloured them in with crayons and pasted on colourful feathers. These are going to be the wings for our owls. The third activity that we did was cutting which we really enjoy doing. We read a story about shapes and of course focused once again on a circle. We played a game with the puzzle that has different coloured circles in it and tried to recognize the colours and put them in their matching places.

Upstairs, we looked at a magazine with pictures of owls in it. We noticed the small owls and the big ones and also saw some pictures of bats. Story time today was a little different as we had to try to tell the story rather than our teachers. We know “In Wibbly’s Garden” so well now, and recounted the events in the story as Darren turned the pages. Finn told us about the caterpillar, snail and ladybug; Jamie and Oliver both remembered about the castle, the giant and the hen that laid the golden egg. Once again we re-enacted the beanstalk growing tall and we have now attached the string to the wall and the ceiling and will add leaves to it in the next few days. Kana showed us how to make a nest for the owls that we made last week. We chose a circular plastic container and attached cardboard netting to it, with tape. The cardboard netting reminds us of twigs and branches that birds use to make their nests. We then placed our baby owls inside.

We made Autumn/Fall pictures using red, green and yellow cellophane. We put the shapes that we cut out onto soft laminate. When you look through the coloured cellophane, the world changes colour.

Love Shelley, Darren, Goh, Marie and Kanako