Welcome back Olivia and Christina

Today was a cold and rainy day and we had a full programme inside our classrooms and for those of us who are upstairs on the second floor, we had some time to play in the MPR. When we packed the balls away, we tried to find ones that were a specific colour reminding us of fruit and vegetables. When our teachers said that we need to collect the ones that look like a carrot we looked for the orange ones; when they said we need to collect the ones that like blueberries, we collected the blue ones and when they said we should collect the ones that look like bananas, we collected the yellow ones etc. After we had finished playing, a group of mums, dads and their babies came to play there so our friends and had their second Tokyo Mother’s Group play date. We think that they had fun with their babies playing in our MPR.

   Upstairs, on the main activity table, we continued working on our constructions with wood, styrofoam and card board tubes. We are building castles and are really loving creating our castles with these materials. Some of us started decorating ours with Posca markers which are beautiful bright colours. Noa and Clodia made their castle pictures using the beautiful bright, colourful shapes that we used yesterday. Allie and Ava added details to their pictures e. g. trees, grass and princesses. We think that princesses live in castles because we have heard so many stories about them.

In the library we read a book called “The Sand Castle Contest”. We were so happy to welcome back Olivia today. We missed her so much as she was away since the beginning of the term. She became our Immigration Officer when we went on a flight to Germany as part of coming to the end of our project on countries from around the world. She called us all up one by one and asked us to look at the security camera and then she put a German flag stamp inside our passports. Jessica and Noa were our flight attendants today and they served us pretzels and German sausage. When we arrived in Germany our teachers asked us: “What do you think castles are made of?” And these were some of our answers: Beckett – metal; Tokutaro – hard stuff.

We then looked at some styrofoam blocks that looked like parts of a castle and put them together to look like the walls of a castle and the castle towers. We then took turns to build sand castles using real sand and castle shaped moulds and plastic cups. The sand was quite wet so some of it got stuck inside the moulds. Tomorrow we will try again and hope that the sand will be a little bit dry.

  Downstairs, we started a huge collage which depicts what grows under the ground, what is above the ground and what is in the air, in nature. The colour that we used for under the ground was brown and the colour that we used for above the ground was green. Earlier in the week, we tore sheets of coloured tissue paper into pieces and today we tried to crumple them up into little seeds and paste them onto the brown. All plants start off as little seeds and need to be placed inside the brown earth and then they can grow. They get food from the earth and water from rain and other sources in order to grow. Plants are similar to us because we also need water and food to grow. Miyu, Lilian and Vincent spent a long time pasting the seeds on to the soil and making flowers and plants above the ground. Our next step is to learn how plants stay anchored in the ground and we will add this to our collage. In order to make the flowers and plants we used pipe cleaners, straws and some stickers for their stems; stickers for the actual flowers and green felt and tissue paper for the leaves.

  At another activity table we had a few pieces of coloured cardboard attached to one another and our task was to use the variety of drawing utensils to decorate the paper. We had dot paints, coloured pencils, markers, sparkly pens and wax crayons. We also had puzzles at our small table and later on during the morning, a few of us did cooking.

Our cooking experience was in preparation for our South African experience which we will have on Friday. Shelley is going to pre-bake a melktert which is a milk tart, so that it is ready for us to taste on Friday. Today Adrien, Marc and Miyu helped make the pastry which needed to go inside the pie dish first and cook a little. They used flour, one egg, sugar and some butter. They used an electric beater to mix all of the ingredients together and watched as they became stuck like a ball in the silver long parts of the beater. Liezel brought some more flour to us, so that we could make the dough less sticky. We helped pour in all of the ingredients and Shelley pushed the dough down into the tray. We watched as it was baking in the oven and are wondering what is going to go inside the pastry shell.

  We love building towers with construction toys and other toys that fit inside one another. Today we used coloured shapes from our pegboard and Lego to build towers. On top of the Lego towers we put people and animals. We always like to see how high we can build before the towers fall down. Our towers did not fall down today.

Hisami took out four Lego blocks in red, green, yellow and blue and she had a beautiful square scarf as well. She showed us the colours as we revised these colours which most of us know. Then she hid one of them underneath the scarf; showed us the colours that she had left and asked us if we knew which colour was missing. One time she even hid two blocks underneath the scarf and asked us if we knew which ones were missing. We had to use our memories really carefully. She then took the scarf and made it into a few different shapes. She made a square, circle and triangle. We watched her carefully as she folded the scarf and then worked out what shape it was.

Thanks for a fun day at Ohana and we are looking forward to seeing you tomorrow……hopefully the sun will be shining.

Love always, Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Goh, Christine, Maryna, Sharee and Rama