Our map of the world

We changed the calendar all by ourselves because some of us know exactly what the days is, the date, the weather etc. Some of us know how to read words or recognize the shape of words so we take the names and numbers out of our calendar box and replace them on the wall. We also have a full calendar underneath our calendar, hanging on the wall so we can see how many days there are in the month and which days have passed; and which days are still to come. 

This morning some of us spent a long time working on our map of the world. Since we completed the outline yesterday, today was the day to fill in the countries and the ocean with water colour paints. We worked a few of us at a time. As with all of our projects, sometimes only a few of us work on each project, at a time. It depends on where our interests lie and our teachers support this. Sometimes we have projects that they want us all to be a part of. We used pastel colours as much as possible to fill in the countries on the map and we started painting in some ocean as we needed to be able to see the demarcation of land and sea. Kai checked on the map where the countries were and which parts were perhaps inland seas or lakes. While we were painting, we could see how the map came together and we looked and compared ours with the one on the wall. When we use water colours, 

we have learnt to dip the brush in water to dilute the paint more and sometimes we paint over the colour on the paper with only water to make the colour thinner. We may outline the countries and borders when we are finished and are enjoying the process of making our own map of the world. Our teachers say that our map is a little old because some countries are no longer in existence or have changed their name. The world is constantly changing! We are keen to travel the globe in International Months with our parents and see where the countries are, that we will specifically travel to in Flowers Class. So far we have travelled to Japan, for Setsubun and next week we will travel to Taiwan with Kai, for Chinese New Year celebrations.

You can see from the photo here that our 500 piece puzzle is coming along. This morning Liezel continued to help us and Shelley came and just did Minnie Mouse’s dress. We have spent a long time working here and are looking forward to completing the puzzle soon. Maybe tomorrow!

We worked with Hisami making preparations for our Valentine gifts/cards. Today we had pieces of coloured paper, folded with a curved line on one side. We cut out along the line and when we opened up the shapes we noticed that we had created a heart shape. We ended up making hundreds of heart shapes and will use these for our special thing that we are making. We don’t want to tell you what we are making because it is a surprise. OK?

We played a matching game earlier in the day with cards that had photos of famous art works on them. Shelley said that everyone in the world is an artist and all of us are artists. She said that we all have our own unique way of expressing ourselves when we are creating with paints and other art materials. Sometimes artists paint scenes from nature and these are landscapes and sometimes artists paint themselves. We made self-portraits last term and will make ours tomorrow, to see if the way we draw ourselves has evolved at all. We will use pencils, white paper and mirrors, to use as a reference so that we can see what we really look like while we are drawing.

We sat together and played a game first with seven animals and then with ten. The reason why we added three more was because it was too easy for us. Shelley placed the animals on the floor and then she took a smock and said: “Which animal wants to go to the park today?” She covered them all and then took one out while hiding it under the smock. Shelley tried to teach us to put our hands up when we know the answer, rather than just putting our hands up. Some of us understood what she meant. We knew which animal was missing each time but the last time, she tricked us. She pretended to take an animal but she didn't take one! We were puzzled. We were confused. Which animal was missing? And then Mirai said: “There are no animals.” Jotaro said: “There are no  animals.” We all counted the animals and there were ten, so there were no animals missing. We smiled!

Thanks for another fun day in class, and we are looking forward to another fun day tomorrow and the next day and the next day……

Love from all the children in Flowers Class.