Mixing colours for SHOW and TELL
It was an interesting day for us in Petals Class today. Whenever our teachers attend workshops they always come to class full of inspiration and excited about being teachers. They sometimes bring new ideas and at other times, they add something to what we already do in our classroom and make it slightly different. Shelley is attending workshops every day this week. The workshops are all about the Reggio Emilia approach to Early Childhood Education. Since she always liked what they do and tried to adapt aspects of the philosophy to what we do at Ohana, she is rethinking what we do in our classroom and what we can add to the way we learn. We enjoy new things and are excited also to learn from Hisami after her Reggio Emilia experience on Sunday.
Today it was Yuki’s SHOW and TELL and we loved what he brought to school. He brought a colour chart, bottles of paint and empty plastic cups. On the chart were colours and numbers. There was a flap with a question mark on top of it, next to each set of colours. Yuki told us what the colours were and he also told us what the colours would be when you mixed them together. He was correct with each one. Shelley helped pour the paints into the plastic cups and we saw new colours appear. The red and blue became purple; the red and yellow became orange; blue and yellow became green; blue and white became light blue; red and white became pink. The colours mixed perfectly to create new colours. It was such fun to watch the colours mixing and see what colours were hiding underneath the flaps when Yuki lifted them up. Thanks Yuki for bringing such an interesting SHOW and TELL to school. We all loved it. We are still learning how to ask questions and at the same time, our friends who are doing their SHOW and TELL, are still learning how to respond to them. We love seeing the things that our friends bring for SHOW and TELL and really appreciate the effort that our families put in to it too.
We added some orange to our paintings for GIVE and were amazed to see the paint drip down, when we lifted the canvasses up. You can see from our faces how surprised we were. Hisami sat with us and introduced Hina Matsuri to us. It is a Japanese doll festival celebrating girls, and when you go to hotels, certain department stores, shops and houses, you will see seven steps with beautiful Japanese dolls on display. The dolls are placed in order of superiority, which means that the most important ones are on the top steps. On the top are the “Ohinasama” and “Odairisama” which are the emperor and empress. Then there are the attendants and musicians. Shelley has a whole set of them but it is hard to display them in our classroom because they would take up so much space. We have some things in our classroom for display. A few of us made our dolls using origami paper with a red background. We will look at some photos of “hina ningyo” to see how beautiful they are and there is some information about Hina Matsuri on our notice board outside our classroom.
We are genuinely caring towards our friends in class and you can see from the photo of Owen blowing Alexander’s nose, with a tissue. He did this all by himself, because he saw that Alexander’s nose was running.
Liezel spent time with us at the large table, talking about numbers, counting, seeing if we knew any of the letters of the alphabet and if we recognized our own name on our flashcard. The year is racing by and we are growing up so quickly; our teachers always try to observe us and notice things that we can do and also skills that we still need to practice and develop.
Today our teachers gave us more options than usual. They asked us if we all wanted to go to the park and two of our friends didn’t want to, so Liezel stayed behind and looked after them. Actually, we think that Liezel may have broken her toe, so Shelley and Hisami told her to stay at school and they took the rest of us to the park. We hope that Liezel will rest more so that her toe can heal…..
Thanks for a great day today and see you tomorrow for more fun and learning with our friends and teachers in Petals Class.
All the children in Petals Class.