Spring and Sakura

Now that we celebrated Setsubun and the Chinese New Year, although the bitter cold breeze seems to say otherwise, Spring is really just around the corner.  Have you noticed the buds on the barren Sakura branches slowly puffing up.  Today in Buds we took a close look at some Sakura branches and now we are waiting for the Sakura petals to cover our whole neighborhood in...blue, purple or pink?

 Morning Activities

 Canvas Art

So far, on the canvas, we have added some blue paint, pastel crayons and green dot markers...Today, we squirted some shaving foam and white paint on a big tray and we just widely mixed them up with our little fingers!  Then we put our hands covered in fluffy white foam on to the canvas…We patted, spread, scraped, smooshed and smashed all over the canvas!  We had so much fun experiencing the funny creamy texture between our fingers while we created more art on our HUGE canvas.  Did anybody say that the canvas is too big for us?  What do you think the white is representing?  Please keep following our process...

 Light Table and Spring Still Nature

Many trees are still looking naked but if we look closely, you can see tiny buds coming out.  Over the light table, we used our magnifying glasses to observe some Sakura branches, newly shooting pine leaves and some insect figurines along with pieces of yellow, pink, and green cellophane paper.

 Animal Figurines and Lego blocks

More and more, we are becoming aware of the people and things surrounding us.  Figurines and blocks are great ways to associate the world around us to and play imaginative play with.  We also just love lining them up one by one ;)

 Soil Playing

Who loves the smell of fresh soil?  We do!  We love playing with soil!  We can scoop some soil and fill it up in cups and then we empty the cups and then we do the whole procedure over and over again.  Thank you teachers for cleaning up the floor!

 Circle Time

We started our circle time shaking our sillies out, marching around the circle like dinosaurs and playing freeze dance!  Once we were settled enough to sit on our bottoms, we played along some finger songs and sang our morning song to greet each other.  “What is this?”  asked Nanako as she popped out a branch.  We passed it around our friends and we had such great ideas!  O guessed that “blue” flowers will start blossoming, “purple” said K and “pink” said E.

For the next activity, Nanako took out a big piece of paper with outlines of shapes in different colors.  We matched pieces of cut out shapes on to the paper.  After Nanako added a few more things, what do you think we saw on the paper?

After eating our yummy snacks, we headed out the door early enough to fully enjoy the beautiful weather outside!  Every time we walk along the alley, we are excited to see the construction site and examine how much progress has been made just like our art in progress :)

Thank you for another lovely day!

Love, Buds Class Children