Venezuela - muchos gracias!
March 10th, 2020
Well, rainy days mean more to do in the classroom and of course lots of nourishment for the plants in our garden. While we were having fun inside, our flowers and plants were having fun in the garden…...soaking up the rain so that it could feed their roots. In fact, at some stage during the day, we thought that the rain had stopped but it hadn’t. We saw the sun but wondered if it was going to be a monkey’s wedding (Benjamin)
During the morning, we worked on our luggage for our travels. We now have pockets inside our suitcases and added stickers to decorate the inside and outside. We also pasted our song about the continents inside. We love reading and sounding out words and sentences so Vieda thought that this would be a good idea for us. When we are “travelling” we can open up our luggage and try to read the words of the song.
Our tables were packed full with things for us to do this morning. At one of the tables we had a selection of words and letters. We could choose whatever words we wanted. Then we looked for the letters that matched those inside the words, and made the same word. We did a few of these and some of us are able to work out both upper and lower case letters for matching. The words that we made had a combination of upper and lower case letters. We read the words before we made them.
The second activity that we had today was one that we hadn’t done before. We really enjoyed it as it was like a secret activity. There were four tray with sand inside them and a paint brush for each. Next to each tray was a piece of paper with either shapes, numbers from one to 15, 15 to 30 or shapes. There was also a small container of discs next to each tray. The aim of this activity was matching and perhaps reading and recognizing shapes and numbers. We used the paint brush and brushed the sand gently until something was revealed. Then we looked at the sheet next to us to find the matching shape, number or word. We used one of the coloured discs to cover the matching shape, word or number and continued until we had uncovered and matched everything in our respective trays. We did this activity later in the day as well when we had more time to sit at the tables. During the morning we only had a short time, because we had a surprise party for two of our teachers. It was not so easy to surprise them, but the office was so creative. It was a birthday party for Vieda and Erika and Gaelle pretended that she needed something from them, while we escaped very quietly from the classroom and tiptoed down the stairs to Buds Class and waited for them. When they eventually entered Buds Class and saw the entire school sitting waiting for them, they couldn’t believe it. They had been tricked! We sang “When you’re happy and you know it” and clapped our hands, stamped our feet, winked our eye, shouted happy birthday, whispered happy birthday and just mouthed the words with no sound coming out of our mouths. We gave them cards and they blew the candles out and then we sang “happy birthday” in many languages. We sang in English, Japanese, French, Tagalog, Norwegian, Xhosa and Spanish. It was so excited to hear the same song sung in such an International way.
Afterwards, the fun was still not yet over. Waiting in our classroom was…..Marvy! Sara’s mum came to teach us all about Venezuela. Jamie said that he wanted to visit the country and so too, did Shelley and Kai. What amazing scenery they have their and they have the highest waterfall in the whole world. It is called Angel Falls. Marvy showed us a video of some of the special things that you can see in Venezuela. Sara told us that you can’t go there now because there are bad people. This of course led to an interesting discussion about people.
Momo: I don’t think that there are bad people in Japan.
Ai: They don’t look bad but maybe they are bad. We don’t know.
Marvy: It is not a good time to go to visit Venezuela but maybe when you are an adult, you can go there.
Some children: What is an adult?
Ryoma: When you are a mom or dad
In Venezuela there is Savanna, which is another name for grasslands and most of the country is flat. There are amazing beaches in Venezuela and it is summer all the time. We noticed that there was a mountain with snow in the video and Marvy told us that there is a mountain called Pico Bolivar which always has snow on it. It is 4,978m high. The main city is called Caracas and it is the longest cable car in the world. The national tree is a yellow tree and it blooms at the same time as the sakura do in Japan. It is like the sakura tree of Venezuela and only lasts two weeks, just like sakura. We made a yellow tree for our passports. The tree is the national tree of Venezuela and it is called “Araguaney”. The national bird is the trupial which sings and they have many “Guacamaya” that are like parrots. They are the equivalent of crows in Japan but they eat fruit. There are so many amazing tropical fruits growing there like mangoes, bananas, pineapple, papaya and guava.
We saw some pictures from the movie “Up” which was about a man who wanted to see the Angel Falls when he was little and he put balloons all over his house, when he was an adult so that he could see the falls. The flag has three horizontal stripes viz. yellow on top for the gold that comes from the earth, blue for the ocean and red for the blood that was shed to get their freedom.
And then we had a wonderful time getting ready to eat “Cachapas” with the most delicious cheese on top. Oy my gosh! We loved them and each one of us had at least a half of one. There are many other delicious foods to eat that are traditional in Venezuela and Marvy made this delicious one for us.
Another amazing natural happening is called “Catatumbo”. This takes place in a certain part of the country and it happens every night. There are storms, sometimes strong winds and lightning that bounces off the water. We saw some amazing photos of the lightning. Wow! There is also a desert called “Medanos de Coro” with lots of sand and people go there early in the morning or late in the evening because it gets too hot during the day.
We think that even though there are bad people in Venezuela now, and we shouldn’t go and visit the country now, we would love to go there one day. Thanks Marvy for teaching us about the country of your birth and we loved eating the “Cachapa” for snack time. MUCHOS GRACIAS!
So you can see that the day was full and we learned and played so much. Do you want to hear more about what we did in class today? OK!
We played a game with number symbols and our names. Shelley gave us each a number and all of our names were spread out on the floor. Kai played music and we danced in between the names. When the music stopped we looked for a name that had the same number of letters, corresponding to our number. Later on our “Question of the day” was “Does Antoine have seven letters in his name?” Yes or No? In the beginning, we had 16 children say yes and three children in the no category. They checked the number thoroughly and soon there were 19 children in the yes category. It was so much fun trying to find a name whose letters matched our numbers. We loved the dancing and did, jumping dancing, sitting on our bottoms and dancing just with our upper body, moving only our lower body and much more. Then the game continued and we danced around and when the music stopped, Shelley drew a number in the air with her finger and if it matched our number, we put the number in the box and put the name on the magnetic board. Oh, so many things to remember! And so much fun was had. Thank you Emma for bringing a real cotton plant from your neighbour for Show and Tell. We hope that we can take some seeds and make a cotton plant.
The lucky last thing that we did was listen to a story about the pink and blue striped whale that could not make friends. Maybe if you ask us, we can tell you what happened in the story, when we are at home.
Stay warm everyone, and see you tomorrow
Love always, all the children in Flowers Class.
