Dots dots and more dots

It was such a busy day at school today with many of our friends having after school classes, after school care and during the regular school programme, we were working on our activities and preparing for Setsubun and Chinese New Year. Upstairs, the Montessori toy with different shapes was on the table, this morning. These shapes are made out of metal pieces and this activity is quite difficult to do. Both the positive and negative shapes make patterns. Beckett and Jennifer selected a marker each and drew a shape using the negative shape first. They then took another colour, placed the metal piece on top of the negative shape that they had already drawn, and drew the positive shape on top of it. Once they had completed this part of the activity, they could turn the metal piece so that the shapes overlapped one another and create a new design.

On the main activity table, we are working on our “Pop Art” group project and we drew large shapes. We practiced our cutting skills and cut the shapes out and are going to use some of them on the art work. Once we had cut all of the shapes out, we used the small pieces of wood which we had cut yesterday, and stamped dots all over the shapes. We are looking forward to putting the parts together to create the whole art work and are wondering what it will look like in the end. We also spent time putting dots all over the large piece of paper which will be the background of the art work. We created these dots from the lids of markers that we kept, when the markers had dried out. Instead of throwing the lids away, our teachers thought that maybe we could recycle them and use them for something. Well, the background of our “Pop Art” project has become the ‘something’.

  Our story today was called “The Mind of Leonardo” and it was about the famous artist Leonardo da Vinci. He painted one the most famous paintings in the whole world called the “Mona Lisa”. This painting stands in a museum in Paris called the Louvre and if you go there, you may have to wait in a long line, for a long time, in order to see it. We looked at the painting of the “Mona Lisa” and tried to imagine, what she was thinking about. These are some of our thoughts:

Beckett – her friends; Jennifer – what she is going to have for dinner; Ava – if she should buy a jewel bracelet; Blue – going to the park; Yossi – what she is going to eat; Allie – her breakfast of bread and water; Ethan – she wants to read a book; Ryan – about herself; Sophie – she likes sitting because she has lots of treasure; Sean – Mona Lisa is happy; Tokutaro – thinking about letters. Our teachers thought that our responses were really interesting and they wondered whether some of our thoughts were about ourselves!

Downstairs, we arrived at school and completed our large group art work for Chinese New Year. We had beautiful sparkly gold things to add to it today. Our teachers put little blobs of glue on the painting and we could stick the gold sparkly shapes wherever we wanted to.

 We spent part of the morning creating an “oni” using a huge circular round sponge. In fact when we walked back from the park singing “Oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi” our teachers asked us if we wanted to give the “oni” a body so tomorrow we will start to make him a body. We will use him on Monday when we throw the “mame” at him and try to chase him out of the school. We are not sure if he will be able to run away as he is not real! We made his face out of yarn for his hair, a plastic cup for his nose, orange newspaper balls for his eyes, pipe cleaners for his eyelids, feathers for his eyebrows, red paper for his mouth, silver paper for his teeth, red coloured paper for his ears and cone shapes covered in silver for his horns. He looks a big scary but we made him so we know that he is not a real “oni”. We also made individual pictures using gold and red drawing materials and stamped on the red stamp pad with the sponge thimbles. We sat together in a circle after singing our song “Let’s all hold hands in a circle” and we did some more actions and said ‘good morning’ to our friends in Danish, Japanese, English, French, Korean, Hebrew, German, Afrikaans, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog and we also said the traditional hello that people use in Australia which is “g’day”! Shelley told us a story from her head. She didn’t use a book and we all listened intently as she spoke about us just like we were in a storybook. We had another great day at Ohana today.

Love Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine and Maryna