Five little leaves

We started off our day, on another beautiful Fall/Autumn day in Tokyo, with play dough, drawing and our tree art work. We collected sticks in the park today and will add them to the painting. Then, tomorrow, we will talk about the different animals that live in trees or we can find in trees and make them. We have a selection of small books all about animals that we will look at before we start creating them. The entire background of the tree picture is white and we will use newspaper to make the creatures. We put some Halloween decorations onto our mirror in the classroom and then we took them all and put them outside onto the glass on our balcony. If you look up to our balcony, you will see all the things that we have on the glass. There are words and pictures. We have quite a lot of ghosts, bats, witches, Jack-o-lanterns and stars. At the one table this morning, we looked at some pictures of

Halloween symbols that Hisami had taken out and we wanted to draw them. It was interesting to see the things that we drew and our teachers were surprised that we were able to create shapes that looked like Jack-o-lanterns. We started doing sponge painting using Halloween shapes, using orange paint. We will continue working on this large group art work tomorrow, just with orange paint and then when it is dry, we will use black paint. Orange and black are the colours of Halloween. We have a few other activities planned leading up to Halloween which you will see written about, in our journals.

We changed our calendar and decided that we didn’t need to change the weather, as today was as sunny as yesterday. We played a game with a fishing rod, but we laughed because we didn’t fish for fish, we fished for leaves. We have a whole lot of Autumn/Fall leaves that are covered with plastic so they can last for a long

time. On the one part of the leaves is a metal paper clip. The fishing rods are made from sticks, like the ones you find in the park. Our teachers attached a piece of fishing wire to them with a magnet on the end. When we want to pick up a leaf, we try to hold the fishing rod, so that the magnet touches the paper clip. We all had a chance to go fishing and each time Shelley called our name, we laughed and said that we were not catching fish, we were catching leaves!

We know that Autumn leaves fall down from the trees and you can find them in orange, red, brown, green and yellow. Some of us had the opportunity to hold the leaves as we sang our song “Five little leaves” and when “Mr. Wind came in from town and blew………..whoooooo” we let “one little leaf come tumbling down”. We did this until there were no little leaves. Each time one of the leaves fell down, we counted to see how many were left. We will sing this song with slightly different words for Halloween.

Love all the children in Petals Class