Sunny, Cloudy, Rainy Tuesday

The rain came down so hard during the latter part of our day at school. We were glad that we had time to play in the park much earlier though. Our teachers try to give us many opportunities during the day, so that all areas of our development are nurtured. Playing in the park is a very important part of our day. Developing our large muscle skills is essential for our small, fine muscles to work. When we go to Kindergarten, we are expected to be able to sit at a table and work, focusing on tasks required of us. Large muscles are needed for sitting at a table together with small muscles. We think that today we had many activities that covered these areas and more.

We had play time in the park; we had cutting; we had painting with brushes; we had string painting which meant that we used our upper body and finger strength to pull the string across the page; we had puzzles which involved us using our visual perceptual skills to match the colours and shapes of the pieces; we had discussions which involved us using our thoughts, planning and creativity when we were creating our unique art works; we had a funny story called “Aliens love Underpants” which required us to sit and concentrate and listen…………...these are just some of the things that we did which we will explain more about in this journal.

We started off the day doing some free play games and working at the tables. Our work in progress is evolving and today we used string and different coloured paints to make patterns on it. Once the painting was dry, a few of us sat together and cut out thin strips of black paper and glued them on the painting. We tried to attach the strips to one another to create a web like pattern. We like how the painting looks and will work on it tomorrow. It is on the wall where our Lego wall is so we will do something on it while standing. Working on a vertical structure is important for our shoulder strength and core muscles. We are not sure what we will do on it and will look at some collage materials in the morning and perhaps choose to paste something on it.

Kai continued working on our large people viz. Ava, September 25th, 2018 and the couple. On the second painting there are two people and we chose to make one of them a boy and the other one, a girl. They don’t have names yet however they have wonderful clothes. We used a variety of collage materials for their clothes and we also painted their skin which was visible on their arms, legs and faces. We used coloured tissue paper, fabric, coloured pipe cleaners which we cut up in to pieces for the hair, silver glitter for the girls hair and we used markers to draw in their facial features. They look amazing and we have had so much fun making them. We are not nearly finished and are looking forward to doing one more, that we traced two weeks ago. Today some of us started to cut along the lines of the one called “Ava” which we will display in the classroom when we have completed it.

Hisami sat with us while we worked on our “Otsukimi” pictures and she reminded us what the significance of “Otsukimi” is. It is the time of year, in the Japanese calendar, that celebrates the end of the harvest, and the beginning of Autumn/Fall. “Otsukimi” means moon viewing. It takes place on full moon in September and can sort of be seen as the Japanese/Chinese “Thanksgiving”. It actually orig-inated in China thousands of years ago and there, they call it “Full Moon” festival.

In Japan, we celebrate “Otsukimi” by eating odango, which we are going to be making tomorrow …..yummmm! We made pictures representing the symbols for “Otsukimi”. We made a picture with a plate filled with odango. We used paper for the plate and made odango using a cork and white paint. The cork has round edges and odango are round; symbolic of the round full moon. We took some green coloured straw and this became the “susuki” or pampas grass in English. We made a full moon using gold origami paper and cutting out a circle. Then the tricky part was trying to make a rabbit because some people believe that there is a rabbit on the moon, pounding mochi! Hisami showed us some real odango which Shelley bought this morning; and the moon was represented by a cheese tart. It actually look a lot like the moon. When we were talking about everything this morning, we spoke about the moon being a circle shape however it really is a sphere. A ball is a sphere and a globe is a sphere and even a balloon is sort of like a sphere.

We sang our song about the days of the week and when we changed it so that the date matched today’s date, it was sunny and cloudy. However at the end of the day, it was pouring with rain! We tried to look at the words that represent the days of the week to see what similarities they had. We noticed that Saturday and Sunday both start with the letter “S” and then we saw that the end of each word had a “y”; and an “a” and a “d”. When you put those letters together you get the word “day” and all of the days of the week end in “day”. We learnt that when you put the letters “ay” together they make a sound that is the same as the name of the letter “a”. It sounds a little complicated and it is, because English is a complicated language to learn! Hmmm!

Thanks for Terrific Tuesday filled with fun and learning!

XOXOXOXOX

Flowers Class children