Stretching and singing

Yesterday we went to China for International Month and today we went to Korea. We invited Meg’s “hamani” and “habaji” to come to school and teach us something, because they are visiting from America. When they were little they lived in Korea and when they were big, they went to live in America. Meg told us that they live in Atlanta, Georgia. Meg’s “habaji” sat with us while “hamani” helped dress Meg in traditional Korean clothes called “hanbok”. Our teachers had their mouths open in surprise when they saw Meg because she looked so amazing, all dressed up. She was also so proud to be wearing the traditional clothing of Korea. On her head was a special hat called a “jobawi” or “gulle” which a child wears when she turns one year old. 

  When we were learning the Korean words and going through the alphabet, we learnt that some letters from the English alphabet, do not have a Korean equivalent e. g. f, l, q and x. When we heard that there was no “q” for queen, Barbara said: “My mommy is a queen”. Sunny, Meg’s mum asked her: “Who is the king” and Barbara answered: “My daddy”; then Sunny said: “And who are you?” and Barbara answered: “The princess”. We always like to listen to our friends and the interesting thoughts that they have about everything. We want to say “kamsamida” to “hamani” and “habaji” for coming to our class and for teaching us new words in Korean and for visiting us. We forgot to mention that we sang our “Hello” song together and they knew how to sing their names to us. We also want to say “kamsamida” to Sunny who came to our classroom after the meeting upstairs.

We are looking forward to learning about the next country which we think is South Africa, where Shelley was born. Hmmmmm, what is she going to teach us about? Will we learn about food? Will we learn about the animals? Will we learn about the beautiful landscape?

    Lately we have been doing a lot of music combining musical instruments with a CD and also doing actions to songs. The CD has a lady singing and she tells us what to do. There are two songs that we have been singing to; one is called “Move to the beat” and the other is “Our instruments”. In the first one we do one action and then another and combine them e. g. clap our hands and stamp our feet; bend our knees and wave our arms high etc. When we listen to the instruments song, we sit in groups and play along all together, just like an orchestra; then we play our instruments in our small groups and then we play together again. We love this song and have fun rotating the instruments so that we can each have a turn to play all of them.

    Our large art work is coming along slowly but surely. Today we used silver and gold paint together with Lego pieces and round shapes covered in bubble wrap. We dipped the shapes into the paint and walked around the table. Liezel sang a song:

“Stamp, stamp, stamp the paint

Stamp, stamp, stamp the paint

Stamp, stamp, stamp the paint

And walk around the table”.

We love singing songs when we do activities and this was an easy one to learn. Tomorrow we will add some coloured yarn to the art work to give it some texture. It is still a “work in progress”!

We went up to the deck to play and had so much fun sliding, playing with sand, listening to the ocean and waves inside shells, collecting stones, playing with dinosaurs, a maze, wooden pieces, and some wood chips. We liked having a large variety of things to play with and hope that we can go back and play there again soon.

    We also made some interesting constructions using blocks. Meg and Mirai and Shelley made a house for the Zookeeper and then they built walls to make two different zoos; one was for jungle animals and the other one was for farm animals. We took pictures of them because Griffin said that he wanted to build it again and if we have a photo, we will know how to build it.

Thank you for a lovely day!

All the children in Petals Class.