Happy Birthday Noa and Happy Thanksgiving

It seems like we have not been at school for such a long time. Downstairs, some of our friends were not at school today as they went away for Thanksgiving and we hope that they are having a great time wherever they are. Downstairs, Shelley showed us some photos of her trip to Susono where she saw the big Mount Fuji. In fact when she was having breakfast, she looked straight at the mountain which looked like a chocolate ice cream with white chocolate on top. We also saw the beautiful orange, yellow, brown and red colours of the leaves against the crystal clear sky.

We started painting one of our enormous canvasses that we are going to be auctioning off at the Wine Tasting event in January. Each class is making two canvasses which will be “valuable” works of art when we are finished painting them. Shelley used to paint when she lived in Australia and she had an exhibition of some of her work, so she is guiding us as we paint. She taught us that when we paint we have to wait for one colour to dry before we paint over it. If we paint over it when the paint is wet, it gets smooshed into a not so nice greeny brown colour. So today we painted with orange which we made using yellow and red. We shook the bottle with the yellow paint in as it had some water with it, to make it more liquid. We used rollers and a plastic fork to make patterns in the paint; we also pasted some yellow and red tissue paper on it and when it was a little dry, we took some red paint which was very watery and flicked it on to the canvas. Our paintings will take a long time to be complete. We will work on them every day; add some mixed media materials onto them and of course we will only unveil them at the Wine Tasting function. What a surprise everyone will have!

We listened to the story “A Colour of his own” about a chameleon that changes colour wherever it goes. This made it really sad as it really wanted to stay the same colour, just like other plants and creatures. When it met another chameleon, it felt happier as they decided to stay together forever and they would both be the same wherever they went.

Upstairs it was Noa’s party. It was her 5th birthday party and today was her actual birthday. On her cake there were six candles because in Israel you always have an extra candle, for the following year. In Hebrew we say “Yom Huledet Sameach” which means “Happy birthday” and Yossi and Noa taught us how to count in Hebrew up to the number six e.g. achat, shtayim, shalosh, arba, chamesh, shesh. It was lovely to welcome Michal, to the class and her beautiful baby girl, Miya who was in a pouch just like a mummy kangaroo carries her baby Joey. We sang “If you’re happy and you know it”, “Happy birthday to you” in both English and Japanese. When we sing the song “If you’re happy and you know it”, we always make suggestions as to what actions we think that people do when they are happy. We think of things like, clap your hands, stamp your feet, blink your eyes, shout happy birthday, whisper happy birthday, jump and we are sure that there are many other things people do when they are happy. What do you think people do when they are happy? Michal read us a “Dora the explorer” story about how she made a birthday cake for her mum. Usually our mums make cakes for us and we don’t make them for our mums. Maybe we should learn like Dora did. Michal treated us to some delicious Israeli snacks and a delicious chocolate cake. Thanks Michal and Noa for our special snacks today. And we forgot but we gave her a chain of beautiful hearts as a gift.

During circle time, we looked at the two giant canvasses which we will start to paint on soon. We felt the texture of the canvas and felt that it was a little rough but not hard like paper on the table. We looked at a book about an artist called M. C. Escher. He painted lizards, bats and butterflies and we thought that it would be good to use his art as inspiration for our canvasses. We want to create art works that are related to what we have been learning all about as this would be more meaningful for us. This morning Emily and Sophie wanted to add more animals to their grasslands scenes. This time, instead of cutting paper for the trees, they used green pastels. Jenny, Noa and Yossi all enjoyed playing with the cork boards, nails and wooden pieces.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh, Liezel and Christine.

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