Autumn and Our Stomach

Happy Tuesday, everyone! We had such a busy and fun day exploring about food digestion, trying on different ways to paint, talking about syllables, and beginning sounds, as well as counting. Story time gave us a strong connection with our park time activity, too! Please find out all the fun adventures we had below😊

 MORNING ACTIVITIES

            It’s November, and it signals the beginning of a new season --- AUTUMN! We have noticed that the leaves have started changing their color to yellow, red, orange, or brown. We called these the autumn colors and we got so excited that we had these colors for our group artwork. Our group art will be our autumn and Thanksgiving wall poster. We painted this project using unique tools, such as toothbrushes, feathers, and scrapers. We found ourselves giggling while painting because of these unique painting tools! It was so much fun seeing how the colors blended as they created interesting lines and shapes on the poster. We noticed that with the scrapers, the texture of the poster also changed! On the other table, we cut and paint to make a leaf shape piece. Guess what? Please watch out as we turn combine this leaf and group art into our autumn and Thanksgiving project!

            We always love our warm-up activities before story time, and today was not an exception. We enjoyed identifying the sounds of /s/, /l/, and /t/ and giving words that begin with these sounds was challenging and yet so much fun! Recently, we found counting the syllables in our names and words very cool. Whenever possible, we ask each other “how many syllables in _____?” and enjoy the fun of counting them. Recognizing syllables will help us in becoming fluent readers in the future! Keep up the good work, Flowers!

            STORY TIME (The Leaf Thief by Alice Hemming and Nicola Slater)

            What an interesting book title! Au provided a good definition of this word. He said, “Thief is a bad guy. He takes things away from the people”. D added, “Bad guy taking away lots of leaves”. Sh also mentioned that “when someone takes something, he will go to the police officer and take the bad guy to the jail”. Be then remembered something that happened to her and mom. She said, “One time, my mommy and I were playing in the park and our backpack was stolen”. Now that we had a clear idea of a thief, we realized that the story was about someone who takes leaves. As the story progressed, we learned that there was no leaf thief. Instead, it was the wind that gushed and made the leaves to fall on the ground because it’s already autumn! Au said, “When the leaves fall, it will turn to red and orange!”. At the end of the story, Squirrel screamed because he could not see any grass. Be replied, “The snow is covering the ground”, to which D said, “When snow is falling down, it covers the grass because snow keep on falling and falling down and down”. It was a good opportunity for us to chant the four seasons we have in Japan. Soon, it will be winter, and snowflakes will be falling! We sang a song about snowflakes before we headed to Arisugawa Park.

 PARK TIME

            We turned into leaf hunters as we walked around Arisugawa Park. We collected different shapes, colors, and sizes of autumn leaves. We were so happy to see many leaves on the ground. We felt lucky to see how the wind gushed away the leaves off the trees! It was such a beautiful sight! We can’t wait to use these autumn leaves for a craft project!

 QUESTION OF THE DAY (Do we have muscles in our stomach?)

            Tracing the journey of our food from our food towards another body part is interesting. Before we dived into learning about our food journey or digestion, we carefully looked at the number of friends who answered yes/no. We compared the numbers to find out which was a bigger one and tried putting two numbers together. H said, “That’s like you plus 8 and 3”. We enjoyed counting so much that we listened to our friends who could count in other languages than English and Japanese. Sh counted in Hebrew, D in Portuguese, and Liezel in Filipino.

            Let’s start talking about the first part of our food journey which is the mouth. C said that our teeth and tongue help our food to become smaller and encouraged others to share their ideas.

            H: Teeth like chew and cut food.

            C: Tongue, it’s going to taste.

            D: When you eat food, and food go down in the lungs, what happen?

            B: Food does not go in our lungs.

            K: Tongue licks candy.

            H: Tongue helps us to eat food. It’s going up and down.

            D: Tongue helps us to talk.

            K: It help me to click (my tongue).

 We were surprised to hear that our tongue also helps by pushing our food towards the esophagus. H added, “If you use your hand to push down food in your neck, it will get stuck there”. As we were talking about esophagus, we remembered that we also have our trachea or windpipe in our neck. Sometimes when we drink too fast, we feel a little awkward and cough a bit. Be said, “there’s a flap in our trachea that closes so food does not go down there”.  We discovered that our stomach works like a mixer or blender. Also, we learned that we have muscles in our stomach that help food to be digested. Whenever we think of blender or mixer, D said, “we make smoothie. We have cup then put juice inside and mix in the blender. Then, we put coffee, and milk. Then there’s smoothie!” Ky listened intently to D’s story and then said, “Maybe I’m gonna tell daddy to make me smoothie!”. As with the smoothie, our stomach mixes and grinds our food to prepare it for digestion.

 Our learning about food journey for today was from the mouth to the esophagus then to the stomach. We will learn more about the stomach and where our food goes from there tomorrow! Please share what you think the shape of your stomach is and how long our food stays in there.

 Please have a restful evening!

 Love,

Flowers