Manners and measurements
We enjoyed ourselves from the very start of the day. We came in and automatically broke up in several small play groups by ourselves. On the carpet we played with Kapla blocks and dinosaurs. We built towers and made houses for the dinosaurs. There was even a dance party in the dinosaur house. On the big table we had our group art project. Last time, we painted it with fall colors and today to glued fall colored materials on the canvas. We had twigs, cupcake paper, feathers, buttons, sticks and all kinds of other accessories. A couple of our friends wanted to work on a princess puzzle. We didn’t get to finish it but maybe tomorrow we can still work on it. There was also an activity of My Muscles setup for us to play with, where we could use rubber bands to represent our muscles on a body. We were concentrating so much on our activities that we lost track of time, before we knew it, it was almost 11!
Right before circle time we made a train and moved around the room. We had an interesting conversation about what makes the “choo choo” sound in a steam engine. Then that conversation lead to, “Why do train have tires?” and “What should we do/say if something is in our way and we need to get by?” We can say, “Sumimasen”, “Touch them and say sorry”, “Excuse me” or “Sumimasen toottemo iidesuka?” It amazing what kind of conversation we can arrive at just talking about trains.
On Monday, we put our skeleton in the tub upstairs in the garden because he was out growing his house . Today, Kai brought him back down so we could take a look at him. We took him out of the water and he grew some more! Kai showed us how to measure him against the wall. He also explained that this is how we measure our height. Now our skeleton is 63 cm! What would happen if we all had bigger places to sleep? Would we all grow bigger? Now we know the skeletons height but what about ours? Yu volunteered to be measured and her friend helped her. They did it just like what we did with the skeleton. She stood up tall against the wall, we put a ruler on the top of her head and marked it with a marker. After that we looked at what number it was on. What does 9 and an 8 make? We counted from 90 to 98! Yu is 98cm tall. Then Kai pulled out a box like object. Some of us knew exactly what it was and others guessed. “It’s a scale! It’s for looking how tall our legs are.”, “It’s a clock”, “The number changes when you stand on it.” Yes, maybe and yes. It was a scale and it checks our weight. We put the skeleton on it and it went from 0 to 1. It was hard to see the difference so we had to look very carefully. Since we measured the height and weight of the skeleton and measure the height of Yu we should measure her weight too. She stepped on the scale and we looked at the numbers. It’s a bit hard to look at the number if you're not directly on top of it but good thing there are teachers around us to help. 15kg. Is 15 bigger than 3? Yes, Yu is heavier than the skeleton. Now we know how to do measure, tomorrow we will help each other measure our height and weight.
Kai said he wanted to go to a different park so we can gather something for the group art. We finished our snack, put on our sunscreen, bug spray and our smocks. CHOO CHOO, we’re ready to go to Arisugawa Park! At the park, we took a vote and we wanted to go to the green field instead of the playground. We ran a lap with Kai around the field and he asked us if we could help him pick up yellow, red and orange leaves. Some of us helped and the rest of us jumped on rock and ran around. We didn’t see too many orange or red leaves yet but we were able to find some yellow.
On the trek back to school a lot of us said we were tired but when we walked pass Step Park we still wanted to play. Hmm, maybe tomorrow but before we had lunch, Kai read a book for us. First, we went through the book just looking at the pictures while we waited for our other friends to finish their jobs. When everyone was ready he began the book, I Have Manners!. In the book some good manners to have are chewing our food with our mouth closed, covering our mouth when sneezing, walking quietly in the halls, saying please and thank you, do not speak when someone if speaking and many more. After the story we thought about what good manners we have achieved before going to lunch. We all thought of at least one thing that we did. Now that we know what good manners are we can follow it in class too!
There was so much information to digest today. We hope we will have great manners and be more cautious of our actions after our discussions today. What other manner should we learn about? Please let us know so we can share with our friends. Hope you all had a wonderful cool and sunny day!
Much love,
Flowers Class Children