The end of April

Today in the downstairs class, we were just on our way to the park and felt some sprinkles of water falling down from the sky. It was almost like the ‘Chicken Licken’ story when the chicken thought that the sky was falling down. Of course we know that the sprinkling from the sky was drops of rain. So we quickly went back into our classroom, took off our smocks and outdoor shoes and replaced them with indoor shoes, and went into the MPR to play and have exercises. We played with the balls and had turns to sit inside the one cube shape and have our legs almost completely covered with balls; we crawled through the tunnel and attempted to climb the yellow climbing wall which is always a challenge for us.

We hung our beautiful Koi Nobori up and on the one shelf in our classroom is a card with steps similar to the ones that are used for Hina Matsuri. These however are dark blue and are for “Kodomo no hi” which is Children’s Day in Japan focusing on boys. There are ‘kabuto’ and arrows and in fact if you want to see an amazing display for Kodomo no hi, come and look inside our classroom and you will see it. We did some work inside our little books which our teachers made for us. They decided to make little books for us, using white paper. So instead of us drawing on many different pieces of white paper, we have our very own book to draw in. We can take them out whenever we want to and work on them for as long as we want to. We completed some more hearts for someone’s birthday which is next week and we also did some more work on our large canvas. It is looking more and more interesting as we work on it. Today we used giant brushes and sprinkled some golden bits on the thick paint. We splodged some yellow on it too. Tomorrow we will put some paper tape on it and mark out different patterns and then use yellow and mustard coloured paint on it. When we pull the tape off, it will leave many different patterns on the canvas. Upstairs, we arrived at school and found the large ocean scene that we started as a group project. Our teachers wanted us to find our own sea creatures that we made and if we wanted to, we could use them on our individual ocean scenes. Sofia found her sea horse and did just that; she pasted it onto her individual page. Yossi and Margo worked on their 3D sea creatures. They used Posca markers to decorate the plastic and Yossi chose to make a shark while Margo made a starfish.

We read the story “Smiley Shark” and in fact there is a CD with the entire story on it as well so we can listen to it tomorrow. We sang the song “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 once I caught a fish alive”. As we are coming to the end of this theme and the end of the month, we are reflecting on what we have learnt and today we made a list of all the sea creatures that we know. We thought of sea horse, turtle, seal, octopus, penguin, starfish, dolphin, angel fish, puffer fish, flying fish, whale, sea snake, shark, squid, polar bear, jellyfish, lobster, crab, sea snail, anemone and coral. Out of this list we selected our favourites and Sofia decided that even though the Rainbow fish was not on our list, this one was her favourite. In our Yoga lesson we did different poses that are called sea creatures. The shark is one that we have done many times and some of the ones that we chose, we had to think about them carefully and we could make up actions for our friends to do. It will soon be the end of April and there will be a new month. In fact tomorrow is the beginning of the month of May. We are looking forward to a full programme all the way until the end of the year on Thursday 6th June. We hope everyone had a good afternoon and we will see you tomorrow.

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