Straw blown trees

While the day started off really cold, the sun started to peep from behind the clouds and while we were resting, beautiful sunshine was streaming in through the windows. In the park we tried hanging from the silver parallel bars and some of us are strong enough to lift our legs off the ground and swing. We loved going on the roller slide with our friends. We now hold the person who is in front around the tummy and we slide down together. Yay, Gento is back at school and he had a fun day exploring the classroom and getting back into the rhythm of a day at school with his friends and teachers. We are so glad that he is feeling better. We know that this is a time in the year when our friends and teachers get sick. Kana chan went home early today and we hope that she will rest and be well enough to come back to school tomorrow. Gento made his sensory box and he also decorated a heart for Noa’s birthday which we will celebrate on Friday. He enjoyed squeezing the glitter paint onto his heart and Kana gave him a plastic spatula to spread the paint. Shelley showed him how to use his finger to spread it around too and each time he spread some, he wiped his finger on a damp cloth. We all played with the left over paper clay that our friends made upstairs. Sophie was the only one who played with it and made it into crumbly pieces. The rest of us touched it briefly and then didn’t want to play with it anymore. We didn’t really like how it felt. We prefer the play dough and will use it tomorrow as we haven’t played with it for a long time. We went under the table during the day and we think that this is a new play area for us since we did our earthquake practice last week. Our teachers have different thoughts on this.

The other activities that we did today were sticking shapes onto paper with glue sticks. We learnt to pat the paper down on the page when we are gluing it and still do it every time we do sticking or pasting at school. We had a visitor today who was only nine months and we sang some songs for him and his mum. We sang our “Hello” song and included “Tommy Thumb”; “Open them, shut them”; “5 little leaves” and “Everybody tapping”. He is planning on starting school next year and we think that he had fun with us. Once again Tokutaro sang the names of all of his friends and teachers during the “Hello” song.

Upstairs we had a new activity which we started doing as soon as we arrived at school. We had a piece of paper on an angled board and a pipette to squeeze paint from. We squeezed brown paint onto the paper and when it started to dribble down the paper, we took straws and blew onto the paint to make it look like a tree with branches. We put these paintings aside to dry for a while. We then used the crinkly pairs of scissors and cut tissue paper and tear it into small pieces. We then glued them onto the trees and sprayed them with water.  This made the tissue paper become flat and some of the dye from the tissue paper spread onto the paper to give it an interesting water colour effect.

In the story “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” we tried to remember the food that he had eaten on each day of the week. This was a little bit difficult for us especially when we got to Saturday when he ate so many things. We sang and did actions to “The Incy Wincy Spider”.

Love Shelley, Darren and Kanako