Endless faces

Mothers are special people in our lives and today we tried to think about some of the things that tell us who our mums are. Since we have been talking about things that identify us, our teachers thought that we could take it one step further and think about our mums. How do we know who our mums are? Is it how they look? Is it their smell? Is it their voice? Is it how soft their skin is when we hold their hand? Is it the feel of one of their specific items of clothing? Is it how they feel when we snuggle close to them? Since none of our mums were with us today, the only tangible thing that we had, where we could see them, was in our Life Books. We all sat with our Life Books and told our teachers something about our mums, which makes us know that “This is my mum because…………..” The way we did this was by looking in our books for a picture of our mums; then closing our eyes and thinking about them and then we looked again and shared our thoughts.

Here are some of the things that we said:

E: Because she is on the beach

Shelley: How do you know it is your mum?

E: She is with me

T showed us a photo of his mum

Shelley: Who is she holding

T: Baby me

K: Akiko is my mummy

G: My mummy is holding me and my sisters are staring at me. And the other photo is of me and my mum.

A: It’s my mum because she is wearing black glasses

I: My mum is pushing a baby car

Shelley: Who is in the baby car?

I: Me when I’m a baby

A: My mum is taking a picture with me

A: This is only my mummy.

Shelley: I cannot see mummy’s face (he was showing us a photo of him as a baby with Gaelle but her face was not in the photo)

A: The picture is not big. On the top she has a face.

T: I know my mum because she has spots on her face (he showed us the picture of his mum and the spots—freckles)

Shelley: I know my mum because if I look at her, she has a big white part in her hair

S: My mum is smiling

T: My mum is also pushing a baby car. I am a baby

W: My mum is happy

M: I can see my mum has glasses. Yoko has glasses and daddy has glasses too.

Shelley: Does mummy always wear glasses?

M: When she goes in the car, mom uses glasses. When she goes in the bath and when she sleeps, she has no glasses.

Identifying our mums is actually quite easy for us, our teachers think. They think that we actually sense who our mums are and this is something that we will try and talk about more.

Our next discussion was also quite interesting as our teachers wanted to see how much we understood symmetry. Shelley took a picture book and covered parts of an animal and asked us if we could guess what animal each one was.

A said: This is a panda because the feet are black and the body is white.

G: It is a turtle because I saw the tail and it is in the water

Then Shelley covered half of her face with a piece of paper and asked us: What can you see?

T: I saw your Ohana shirt so I knew it was you

W: I see only one eye

Shelley: So how much of my face can you see?

A: Half

Kai printed a picture of half a butterfly which was attached to an easel. We could only see the left half of the butterfly. Shelley asked us if we were able to complete the butterfly and how could we do it. We told her that we could draw the rest of the butterfly. A few of us had turns and you can see from the photos, what we managed to draw.

Afterwards our teachers thought about it and they realised that what we are able to best relate to, is ourselves. So Shelley drew a half a face and we completed this. You can see what we drew with both the half a butterfly and half a face. She told us that when we make one half look exactly like the other half, this is called symmetry. We asked her to draw some shapes so she drew a half a square, a half a circle, a half a triangle, and a half a diamond. Then she turned the diamond into a kite. There are many shapes in life that we can see inside objects; which is another discussion that we can have one day.

When we arrived at school we noticed that all our eyes, mouths and noses were on the tables. We had a really challenging task and that was to try to find the eyes, nose and mouth that belonged to us. Which eyes are mine? Which nose is mine? Our noses and mouths had our names written on the back of them so some of us were peeking. What our teachers noticed is that we are able to recognize facial features of our friends however it is much harder to notice which ones actually are ours. When we had found our eyes, nose and mouth, we then gave them to our teachers who pasted them inside our workbooks/portfolios. They also put our faces on the same page. We will continue working on our faces as the focal point of our identification process and then will look at other identifiers.

In the park we had a great time jumping in between sticks. Kai laid out a number of sticks with large enough spaces between them, so that our feet could jump inside them. We did a zig zag game and used our drink bottles for the zig zags. The last game we played was kicking a soccer ball into the goal; and we made the goal out of two cans. You can imagine what fun it was playing in the park; which was quite full today.

Since puzzles are such a big part of our day in Flowers Class, we had one or two set up for us to complete. One of them had 140 pieces in it. This one is still a work in progress and we look forward to completing it when we come back to school on Thursday.

We are looking forward to Sweet Potato Digging tomorrow with the Weatherperson being responsible for a lovely day together with Chiaki’s teru  teru bozu hanging in the window in Buds Class. Thanks for a fabulous day in Flowers Class.

XOXOXOXOX

All the children in Flowers Class