The colours of fall/autumn

Today is: Tuesday, September 24th, 2019.

The weather is: Sunny and hot

There are: 20 children in our class today

There were: 3 teachers early in the morning and now there are 4 teachers

 We learnt about: Muscles and how they stretch and become long and then bounce back and get small. We used pins in the wall on another person’s outline of their body and represented our muscles with rubber bands. We used pink paper as the background for the three bodies that we traced. We notice them a lot more now because the wall colour and the colour of the paper were the same. Now that they have a background, they stand out more on the wall. One of them is the front of our body and the other is the back. Now we have one that is going to try to represent our muscles. We started off with the legs and put tacks where the top of our legs are, the knees and the bottom of our legs near out feet. We stretched rubber bands around the tacks and are trying to work out how our muscles move. Where do the muscles begin and where do they end. As yet, we do not have answers. It is our time to experiment and find out the answers for ourselves and perhaps, later we can ask our teachers.

When we tried to stretch the rubber bands, we were actually using our own muscles. We were using the muscles in our arms to pull them and stretch them over the heads of the tacks. It was quite tough to pull the rubber bands. We didn’t realise that you use your muscles all the time, even when you are sleeping. When you close your eyes, you have muscles that help you close them so that your eyelids cover your eyeball. We can’t believe how many parts we have on the inside of our body and the outside. We think that the easiest parts to learn are the ones that we can see. Do you know all of the parts that you cannot see? Hmm!

When we were in the park, we used muscles in our legs for climbing and sliding and running; we used muscles in our arms also for climbing, mixing sand and water and holding onto our friends hands when we walked back to school.  What would happen if we did not have muscles? We would be all floppy like a string puppet; and just like Shelley pretended to be, when she flopped down and we helped her stand up. Muscles, muscles! We are grateful to have muscles.

Our art work in progress now has some green on it. We added green because green is also a colour that you see during fall/autumn. Not all leaves change colour, some stay green. The trees that have green leaves are called evergreens. We had so much fun with the green paint. First some of us used straws and blew the green paint all over the painting. The second part to today’s painting was doing some marbling on it. Usually when we do marbling, we put a piece of paper inside a box and roll the marble around by moving the box. Our painting is so enormous, we didn’t have a box for it. So how could we do marbling on it? Well we did scooping marbling with marbles and spoons. It was almost like we were playing soccer and the spoon was our foot and the marble was the soccer ball. Or it could have been like hockey with the spoon being the hockey stick and the marble the ball. We scooped the marbles all over the painting and it made wonderful green lines and four different tones of green. We tried to raise the sides of the painting and when we did this, the marbles came rolling down. The oranges and reds can still be seen and the green is now a contrasting colour on the work in progress. We are not sure what we can do next but are sure that our teachers will think of something weird and wonderful to do on the art work.

Early in the morning we played with play dough at one table, and completed birthday cards for our friends. At the birthday card table,  we did some of our own unique drawing, cutting and pasting. We sat on the floor with some transparent coloured blocks and built with them in small groups. We are getting used to working in smaller groups and learning more about our friends in our class. Some of us tend to gravitate towards the same children every day and our teachers are helping us learn about one another and how valuable it is for us to have other options for socializing and play.

We did a fun silent counting game this morning. We kept the numbers inside our brains and watched as our teachers pointed to all of us. Sometimes you can count loudly, sometimes you can whisper and sometimes you can just count inside your own head. Zen and Ai chan counted 19 and that was the number of children in our class at that time. When Rian arrived, he made it 20. We also counted that there were three teachers at that time.

Shelley: Who is missing? Is there anyone missing today?

Eddie: Nanako and Liezel

Zen: Liezel

Antoine: Hisami is a bit sick

Shelley: There are lots of things about our body that we cannot see and there are many things that we can see. What part of our body can stretch and we cannot see them?

All: Muscles

Shelley: What do we sometimes use in class that can stretch?

Momo: A rubber band

Shelley: Perhaps we can use rubber bands to resemble our muscles and see if we can make muscles on one of our bodies that we traced.

We then discussed one aspect of our contract and that was about doing our jobs.

Shelley: What happens if you break the contract that you already signed?

William: If you break the contract, you have to think again. You have to fix it again. Only you and no one else.

Rafael: How to correct the contract if you break it. You have to do it again.

Later in the day, when we returned from the park, Kai sat with us and we measured the skeleton. We noticed that he is getting way too big for the container that he is in, however, since he is under water, he is still growing.

Kai: Is the skeleton bigger?

Magnus: A tiny bit bigger

Rafael: He’s more bigger than yesterday

Momo: If your dad or mom have a birthday, you’ll get a bit bigger

Kai: How come I stopped growing?

Eddie: Because you have to eat more

Kai: How come when you eat, you grow so much?

Lisa: Kids need to be taller, like dad or mom

Kai: How do we get taller?

Zen: You eat food to get taller

Magnus: We need to put the skeleton in a big box so it could grow like an adult

William: What is an adult?

Kai: An adult is like your mom and dad

Shelley: If I can’t grow taller anymore, can I grow sideways (demonstrating with her hands)

Momo: Then you can make more Shelleys

Shelley: Can I grow bigger sideways?

William: You’ll have too many Shelleys

Magnus: If you’re not balanced, the one next to you might get squashed if you fall

Eddie: I think it’s dead (referring to the skeleton and that it stopped growing). I will miss the skeleton if it dies

We then voted to see if we still wanted to put the skeleton inside the water to grow more. The majority wanted it to go in the big trough on the balcony.

Rafael: Put him in the big tub so it does not get squashed.

It was a busy day of activity, time playing in the park and discussions.

Thanks everyone for stimulating our brains and making our muscles move.

Love always, all the children in Flowers Class.