We are "Scientist"

Welcome to the last week of summer school! This week our theme is SCIENTISTS!

We arrived this morning to see buckets of water on the table. We asked are teachers what is the water for...swimming? Drinking? Playing?

Actually it was for cleaning! As we come to the end of the week, our teachers asked us to help them get ready for the new school year. This morning we helped our teachers clean the lego toys, it was so much fun! We loved splashing around in the water and playing, more than washing the toys...hehehe!

At the carpet area we chose to play with cars and read some books this morning. Our library area is getting more and more popular everyday. Children are gravitated to the new books and love sharing their imaginative ideas with each other.

Oh, it’s clean up time….we have a special guests coming to class today. Look, its John, Nimo and Buds class! We decided to join Buds class and Petals today, for a special Music and Movement class. As the weather isn’t the best to go out today, why not shake and move our bodies with our amazing music teachers!

We did all the classic Ohana songs and some new songs too. Thank you Buds class for coming and sharing the wonderful world of music with us!

For our circle time today we became ENTOMOLOGISTS!! An entomologist is a scientist who studies insects. Though the weather hasn’t been the greatest for catching bugs, we were lucky today to have neighbors from the temple catch 3 big beetles...Woohoo! They were kind enough to gift it to Ohana, making our entomology studies very successful!

Sayaka and Kiki helped us take the beetle out of it’s container to have a closer look at it. Kiki explained that in Japanese it’s called “Kabutomushi,” but in English it’s called “Rhinoceros Beetle.” Kiki then showed us interesting things about the beetle, using the magnifying glass:

1. It has 6 legs

2. It has a head and body, but NO neck.

3. Two tiny eyes.

4. Two horns, one large and one small.

5. It has “arms” but not like ours. It’s small and near it’s mouth.

6. It has “hair” is called fur, but it’s under where his belly is. His belly is very sensitive, so we should never hold it from there.

Kiki also talked about the food beetles like to eat. This got them very interested, and wondered were beetles can get their jelly and fruits to eat? They cannot go to the supermarket? Our little scientists brains were working

SENSORY ANALYSISTS!

“Sensory science uses people to describe and evaluate flavors, textures, appearance and other attributes of foods. Sensory techniques can be used in the food industry to narrow down concepts and choose products, optimize a developing product and monitor and control quality of the finished product. Many scientists use tests and their senses to break down the structure of a product and indicate what the ingredients and flavours for the product are.”

Sensory evaluation practices are a great exercise for children’s development and get their problem solving skills a great workout. In the morning, during circle time Kiki sat down with Petals and introduced the “game.” Kiki and Sayaka would bring out food, and as sensory analysists, they would have to use their sense to figure out, what the food items were. Kiki named them Food A,B, C, D and E, to keep things a mystery. They started by looking and smelling the food, then they

used their touch and finally the used their tongues to taste and lick the food. Kiki explained that this is not eating time, therefore you cannot eat everything in one go. You can only take small-small bites. With this we began, and the pictures on the your left are their guesses.

We did A, B and C food items in the morning, before snack. After snack we visited D and E food items. Our Petals were able to make a lot of accurate guesses. A food was pizza, B was dehydrated peach, C was sausage in puff pastry, D was lasagnas and E was a mango & apple juice. We were pleasantly surprised to see how well they recognized flavors, fruits and vegetables.

There was a lot of “eating” and tasting done today.

By the time we finished our activity the weather outside was too hot for us to go to the park and we were short on time. We decided to have a little free play time and then had our lunch. Hopefully we can have an early park tomorrow, to escape the heat.

We had a great day of learning and maybe we have a future career as an

ENTOMOLOGIST and SENSORY ANALYSISTS

Have lovely evening and see you all tomorrow!

Loving Summer Petals