First official day of the last term
“What a difference a day makes
Twenty-four little hours
Brought the sun and the flowers
Where there used to be rain”
Today we saw beautiful sakura in the park and collected as many as we could and put them in between books to press them flat. We pressed some rose petals at the end of last term and will combine these with our cherry blossoms to make a picture on soft laminate tomorrow. We are focusing on spring, and new beginnings in our classroom and today we made a still life picture using coloured pencils and markers. We looked at one branch filled with small branches with cherry blossoms at the end of them. We spoke about the colour, the shapes, the number of petals which we counted and then proceeded to draw a picture. Many of us took up the challenge of copying our names from our flashcards which felt really exciting. Shelley guided us and spoke to us about the shapes of the letters which made us persevere and………………….
This photo here was taken by one of our mums Daniela Lukovac-Farrell
Since some of us are really keen to write our names, we will have a small table with our flashcards, paper and pencils, so that we can practice. While we were drawing our cherry blossom still life, we tried to look carefully at the flower in the vase to see what it looked like. Our drawings are our very own perspective of the flowers and what we saw. We will look at the flowers again tomorrow and see if we want to add something to our pictures.
During the morning we had an interesting discussion on what we use to think with. Shelley started the discussion with:
“I want to ask you a question but I need to think. What am I thinking with?”
We will document the discussion at the end of this journal so that you can see how it proceeded and where it went. Shelley’s goal initially was to talk about “Hanami” and what we liked about our spring picnic yesterday. As you will see, we had many different thoughts and comments to share. We all really loved the day out however the cherry blossoms seemed to be incidental to the event, for us.
This is a picture of the cherry blossoms in the park today. They are just starting to bloom so there were not many on the ground for us to pick up. However, as we came nearer to school, on our way back from the park, we noticed that there is a cherry blossom tree outside the community center for old people. We asked them if we could pick up the cherry blossoms that were on the ground so Mirai and Shelley picked them up together.
We enjoyed being in the park, hanging upside down and running around with all of our friends from Ohana, plus other schools and people who came to have a picnic, under the cherry blossom trees. We will also have a picnic in the park this week.
We have a new Lego set in the class which Shelley bought in Australia. It is a fairy tale Lego set with so many pieces and shapes. Many of us spent a long time playing with the Lego during the morning and in the afternoon; we loved creating our own shapes and things and particularly enjoyed seeing so many tiny accessories.
We also had another story in the series of “Wally the whale” and this time, it was a whispering story. The reason why it was a whispering story was because “Wally the whale” didn’t want any to know where he was. He eventually told us that he was in New Zealand, but he kept on saying “sh” so that we would talk quietly. He said that he wasn’t sure when he would come to Japan, but it had to be a secret. The reason for this was that sometimes there are ships that hunt whales and he didn’t want to be one of those hunted whales. “Sh!”
It is such a lovely day, we would love to go outside and play after school.
Thanks for a fun day back in Petals Class.
Love,
All the children in Petals Class.
