More beautiful butterflies

Today was different from yesterday which was not unexpected however it was a lot more different than usual downstairs. Today was an “all girls” day! Our handsome young men, Tokutaro and Gento were both sick as well as Sophie, and we want to send them our special “get well wishes” and hope that they will have time to recover over the weekend and be well again on Monday. Having no boys today really made the day different and even though we missed them, we still had a great day with our friends and teachers. We started off with an activity where we placed rocks in the base of two pots; we then spooned soil on top of the rocks until the container was almost full and then we looked at two sachets with pictures on them. One had peas on it and the other had flowers on it. We opened them up and inside were tiny little seeds. The pea seeds were roundish and green and the flower seeds were dark, long and thin. We pushed them inside the soil, just as the children did in our story book “A Surprise Garden”. We tried to push the seeds deep inside the soil and then we put water in a bottle and watered them. We put them near the window sill and will wait for them to grow. We wonder what they will look like when the shoots start to sprout above the soil.

The second activity we did was tearing coloured tissue paper and putting it in a big tub of water. We used plastic spoons and mixed the paper mulch around. We saw that there were many different colours but none of them mixed together. They all kept their own colour. We also did a cutting activity and Shoko cut out a large selection of foods and pasted them onto a page which we will put inside her portfolio/workbook.

Isabel, Jamie, Noa and Oliver all worked on the large butterfly with the threaded ribbon on it. The butterfly already has a ribbon edge which some of us sewed on yesterday. Today we added buttons to the wings by making holes using the hole puncher. We then selected some buttons and pushed the button hoops through the holes; and then used small pieces of pipe cleaners, which we twisted in order to hold the buttons in place.

We practiced our Earthquake drill and were really quick to get under the table. When we went outside, we decided to walk around the neighbourhood looking for things that have grown. We already know that our garden in the park has plants and flowers that have grown. But what have other people grown? We saw lots of potted plants and flowers and especially across the road from our school, there are so many plants near the one garage. We can see that the people take care of them as they are growing.

We had a fun lesson for our KIDFIT gymnastics class. Shoko told her teachers that the class is really long and we should ask the “nastictics” to be shorter. We all had a great time in the class and will have one more lesson focusing on the skin and how we can take care of it and protect it from the sun. Upstairs we also made a butterfly from the letter “B”. We used pipe cleaners for the antennae and made a stencil out of tape so that we can draw different sized circles. We then coloured them in with markers. Have a great weekend.

Love Shelley, Darren, Goh, Sabine and Kana