Hand prints

Upstairs we work really well as a team and today we displayed this great quality in all of us when we made our first 3D sea creature. We looked in the book “1001 things to see in the sea” and chose to make a puffer fish. We chose orange and green plastic and cut out two halves which looked almost exactly the same. We added spikes to it as these are the things that it uses to protect and defend itself from enemies. We stapled it together and left a hole open so that we could stuff it. We sat together and squeezed newspaper which we then stuffed into the one open part of it and now it looks almost looks like a real puffer fish. Jennifer asked if we could make a starfish too so this is our next 3D project.

Before we started working on the puffer fish, we read the book “Tiddler” and we are now helping tell the story. We know when the line “Oh, no he didn’t” comes along, we have to say: “Oh yes he did” and we say the words out loudly almost as if we are reading the story. We then went to the tables and put gold and silver paint on our Koi Nobori’s. When we first arrived in the morning, Sean, Beckett and Nico sat and played together. They started off arranging the Kapla blocks in long rows and then they went to the Lego wall. FJ, Jennifer and Sofia spent their free play time working on the Koi Nobori as they love drawing and decorating things. Noa added sand to her underwater scene and many of us sat and worked on our individual ocean scenes. Downstairs, we started a really big project on a large canvas. Both classes are working on it and it will take a long time to complete. We started by using rollers with pink and orange paint. We loved rolling the rollers up and down and watching the lines appear on the canvas. Our teachers encouraged us to walk around the canvas so that we could use the rollers to make patterns everywhere. Just before we started working on the large canvas, we did hand prints. We are making our own unique Koi Nobori for Children’s Day and our teachers thought that it could look quite effective if we made hand prints on them. We used light pink, light blue, green and orange paint for this activity. It was quite ticklish when our teachers painted the palms of our hands and we made many stamps all over our pages. Liam made his hand into a fist when he saw the paint as he didn’t know what to do and how it would feel. Some of his prints are hand prints and some are fist prints. We will continue working on our Koi Nobori tomorrow and add many circles for the eyes. We will try to cut out the shape of the fish’s tail but may need some help from our teachers and friends.

Tirza loved the hand prints and wanted to do more and more. We washed our hands inside a bucket of water afterwards and we noticed how the water changed colour. Our hands were clean but the water was dirty. We danced and sang to music from the Wiggles CD and sat together and read books in the library. Today we chose what stories we wanted to hear and a few of the ones that we chose were from the Nemo series and also ones about bees and flowers. During circle time we sang our “Hello” song and then we sang “Open them, shut them” as it is one of our old favourites. We also sang a song about the food we love to eat. The song that we sometimes sing has words that go like this: “I like to eat apples and bananas” however we changed the words today and chose foods ourselves. Tokutaro chose strawberries and rice; Tirtza chose apples and oranges; Lily chose pancakes and potatoes; Clodia chose chicken and pasta; Abiya chose chapatti and chicken; Vincent chose fruit; Olivia chose pancakes and fruit; Allie chose pizza and chicken. We also sang our song called “I want you to meet my family”. In this song we learn about the concept, pitch in music. Some of the words we sing in a low deep voice and some of them we sing in a high pitched voice. Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.