Outlining is so much fun

This morning we were greeted by another beautiful sunny day and we are still amazed that there is so much snow and ice on the side of the road. We know that the air is cold but how come the snow and ice have not yet melted? It is a week today since we had the big snow fall and snow day.

We were happy to go to the park today and enjoy being outside even though we could not go in the green area. The green surface in the green area is completely covered in ice and snow and it is quite slippery. The rest of the park was fine and we had fun running around and enjoying being in the fresh, cold air.

We continued working on our paintings and doing black outlines as well as making “oni” masks which have become headbands for our Setsubun celebrations on Friday. We are looking for a book about Setsubun which our teachers can read to us in English and Japanese. At the moment we are enjoying listening to stories first in one language and then in another. It helps us understand the stories better because some of us speak English better than Japanese and vice versa. Vincent, Charlie’s big brother spent the morning with us in Flowers Class and he painted a picture of an “oni” which he said we can keep. Thanks Vincent! We could see the horns on his head, his angry eyes and his sharp teeth. We wonder if there is really a creature called an “oni”?

Mina and Griffin made a painting first and tomorrow Griffin will do the outlining. It was outside on the washing line getting dry first. Mina’s painting was dry so she could do her outlining today. Tomorrow will be our last day of outlining our paintings as most of us have completed ours already.

Kai laid one of the tables with a beautiful bright pink piece of fabric and he asked us to put our hands on it in the shape of a heart. We put our two hands  together and tried to make the complete shape of our hands together, a heart. It 

was quite challenging and the pink fabric kept on moving so Kai took it off and used the white table as a background. We will show you a photo without the pink fabric and you can see that we were able to make the shape more easily. We are looking forward to seeing what the photo will be used for. We took so many photos. One of our circle times was listening to a story however there was an introduction to the story. Shelley asked us if we knew which friend in our class has a short name. We thought of Io, Dev, Meg, and Lia and we counted the letters in their names. Shelley then said that one of our teachers also has a short name and straight away, we knew that it was Kai. We clapped their names and discovered that you only make one clap for their names. When we clapped Shelley, we counted two claps and when we clapped Hisami, we clapped three claps. We have only one friend in the class who has a very long name and her name is Madeleine. Even though she has more letters than Hisami has in her name, she had the same number of claps; three claps!

This led us into the story which was called “Tikki Tikki Tembo. It was a story set in China long ago when people believed that you gave the first born son a really long name and the second son, short names. “Tikki Tikki Tembo” is the short name for “Tikki Tikki Tembo no sa rembo chara bara ruchi pip peri pembo”. This was the little boy’s whole name. Can you believe that he had such a long name? It turned out that having a long name was not a good thing in the end. We are glad that our families didn't give us such long names.

Throughout the morning we worked on doing puzzles of the continents and Jotaro and Taiga put the last remaining pieces into our 300 piece puzzle. Now we need to start doing puzzles with 400 pieces.

We started to sing “Its okay to be different” when we came back from the park and during our afternoon snack we sang “My Favourite Things”. Ethan especially sang with a big voice remembering all of the words. Riou started singing “The Ohana School Song” too. We sometimes break into song during our day in Flowers Class. We think that we may have developed this habit because Shelley has a song for everything. This afternoon just before the end of the day, Griffin said something about food and she sang “Food glorious food, hot sausage and mustard, while we’re in the mood, cold jelly and custard…….” She remembers so many songs from when she was a little girl.

Thanks for a fun time with our friends and teachers today. We are looking forward to welcoming a new friend on Thursday. His name is Yuri.

Love all the children in Flowers Class.