A castle for kings

The sun was shining and the cool breeze blew in our faces as we walked to the park for our fun in the sun time. We were reminded that it is still winter and we await the onset of warmer weather and the blooming flowers; and removing the many layers that we wear each day when we go outside.

Downstairs, we started our day making two large collages. The one is for the board downstairs in the office and the second one is a part of our “above and below” learning experience. Hisami took care of the one for the board downstairs and she prepared some collage materials that represent spring and cherry blossoms. We used brown tissue paper for the tree trunk and branches and pasted them onto a light blue background. We put many cherry blossoms onto the tree and its branches. Some of us made butterflies flying near to the cherry blossoms. We will keep this beautiful collage on the board until the real cherry blossoms appear and add things to it during the next month.

  At the second activity table, we continued working on the long brown collage which we had previously used to paste seeds on and bits of tissue paper. Today we chatted about what we can find under the ground. Adrien thought that maybe there was a snake; Marc thought maybe an ant; Michaela thought maybe a worm and so we set about making some of these little creatures using stickers and pipe cleaners. We also made some snails by twisting pipe cleaners around and around many times so that they looked like the shell of a snail. We also looked at what happens to seeds when we plant them. We noticed that some long shoots grow out of seeds pointing deeper towards the earth; and some grow towards the surface of the ground. The ones that grow up, eventually, grow above the ground so that we can see them. They can be trees, flowers, plants, bushes etc. We will join the brown collage to the green one and then make roots from the flowers and plants that we already did. The roots will go below the ground onto the brown part of the collage.

 During circle time, we counted the number of children that were in our class today and realised that five of our friends were sick today. Taiyo, Vincent, Karl, Haruto and Pauline. We hope that they will get better soon and come back to school so that we can play with them. Hisami used Lego blocks to help us learn how to count. As she placed them on the ground, we counted them until we reached thirteen, which was home many children were in our class today. We read the story “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” and just before snack time, we sang “Chick Chicka Boom Boom”. When our teachers asked us, what was up in the tree? And we said, we were up in the tree. When they asked us “Who said Chicka Chicka Boom Boom”, we said: “We did!” So much of what we do in our lives when we are little revolves only around ourselves.

Upstairs, Blue kindly painted the drawbridge  and door for our castle while Ethan and Ryan painted the section where the drawbridge will go. Our castle is evolving slowly but surely and we are all completely taken up with this project. On the carpet area, the two cardboard towers were one of the favourite toys of the day. We tried to squeeze two people inside one tower and then we became more daring and tried to squeeze in three friends. It was a tight squeeze and you can see from the smiles on our faces, even two people was a tight fit.

Allie started a bit of a competition to see how many boxes she could carry at one time. She managed five boxes. Then we stacked the boxes up on top of one another to make a castle wall and we put a piece of cut out cardboard across the front. We hid behind the castle wall. At another of our tables, we threaded beads to make bracelets or necklaces. We thought that we do not have jewellery to wear in our dress up corner and kings and queens who live in castles, always have treasure. So how about we make our own treasure for the treasure box that we will have in our castle. When we are finished making all of our jewellery, we will find a jewellery box to put all of our things in. Today we went to Amishiro Koen to take care of our flowers which unfortunately died. Since our school is a little bit further away from Amishiro Koen, we do not go there so often, however we still want to continue our planting project and have our Ohana International School garden there. Next week, we hope to plant some new flowers and will try to go to the park more often to take care of them.

 During circle time, we sang “Open them, shut them” and read “King Bidgoods in the bathtub. It is a story about a king who does all of us activities each day, inside a bath tub. He plays in the bath tub, he eats in the bath tub, her dances in the bath tub etc. We thought that it would be fun to eat ice cream in the bath tub or maybe mangoes as they are a bit messy but dancing in a bath tub? We are not sure about! The last thing that we did on our castle today was to draw windows on the walls so that we can look out. We chose coloured markers and then drew rectangular shapes for them. Some of us even drew curtains/drapes.

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