Amishiro plants

We hope you all had a great weekend and we wanted to start by saying a big ‘Thank you’ to all those who made Friday night’s social evening such a great success. This morning was very warm and busy with many of the children dressing up in costumes and working on special heart messages and pictures for their friends who are going to be leaving us soon. It was really sweet to see Clodia, Ava and Olivia all dressed up as princesses while Jennifer and Noa wanted to be astronauts. Allie was really nice to let Ava join her while doing a 70 piece puzzle on the table. We knew we would need to cut short our free play time today as we had to go to Amishiro Koen to water out plants. In circle time we all looked at the wall calendar and saw that it is a new month and we only have a few more days left until our end of year party. Ava, Clodia and Tokutaro all helped out the correct date on the calendar for us. After snack time we got ready for the park really quickly and made sure we took our water bottles. Some of us are able to put on our bug spray by ourselves now as well as a little sunscreen but the teachers also help us to make sure we have covered ourselves properly. On the way to the park we practiced our party songs in both Japanese and English. We were lucky in the park as there were very few children and could use the swings and see-saw quickly. We took our big blue watering can with us and some smaller plastic bottles. The marigolds are almost finished but the pansies are growing really well. Ava and Beckett helped us take out all the dead flower heads and clear away any weeds that were growing. The flowers have been going strong for several weeks now and look really good. Please take a look if you get the chance. When we came back from the park we were all very hot and sweaty but we soon cooled off as we had the air conditioner on as well as the small fan. On the carpet we had a big box of Lego out and we started a treasure hunt for one particular piece of Lego which is missing from a set in Shelley’s class. We drew a picture of the missing piece on a white-board to look at and knew it was red. We found several similar pieces but don’t think they are the right ones unfortunately. We did a big group activity on the table with our paper clay dinosaur fossils too. We started by mixing some red and yellow paint together with a spoon on a plastic board and soon had orange. When we added the blue it instantly turned brown which was perfect for our fossilized dinosaur skeletons. Part of the problem with the white art clay impressions was that it was quite difficult to see the fossil imprints clearly. Using the brown paint and a hand roller we tried to apply paint over the surface but not in the imprints but the surfaces were not smooth enough unfortunately so we switched to a sponge roller. Very carefully we rolled the paint onto the surface and it left the white dinosaur without any paint on it so we could see them clearly. They look great and we look forward to taking them home this week. All our Love, Darren, Ayaka and Sharee