A dark gloomy cave..................

A cool rainy day greeted us this morning and it stayed this way for the entire day, when we were at school. We managed to get so many things done for our “We’re going on a bear hunt” books and were happy to spend time in the classroom, working on some other projects and playing fun games. The one game which stood out for some of us was “The teddy bear hunt”. Liezel brought up four bears from Petals Class and our teachers hid them all over the room. We were mostly great sports and curled up into a tiny ball and hid our eyes, while they were hiding the bears. No one knew where the bears were until we started looking for them. Our teachers chose really interesting and weird places for them. Shelley first chose to put one bear on top of the one flower in the corner of the classroom and the second one that she hid, she put in the non burnable garbage bin, with half of it in the bin, and half sticking out. Hisami hid one on the art shelf and one inside the puppet draw in the dress up corner. Of course all of us were not able to find one of the bears because there were only four bears and 14 children. We played the game twice and another four children managed to find the bears. Most of us were fine about this; some of us spoke about our disappointment and said: “I didn’t get one of the bears”, which was a great way to share their thoughts and

feelings. Some of our friends were really sad and this helped open up a discussion about the feelings we have when we play a game and why we play games. We all have different reasons for our feelings and motivations when playing games. Our teachers asked us: “Is it important to win?” “If we have a good time, is this enough?” We had varying thoughts about this too which are always important.

We counted the number of children in the class today and had 14 children and four adults. Then we counted boys separately from girls and this time we included our teachers. We discovered that we had an equal number of boys and girls. We had nine girls and nine boys. So in total, there were 18 people in the classroom today.

We had a fabulous time singing action songs and pretending to be seeds growing. We told Shelley that we needed water, sunshine and shade if we were going to grow. We sang “I am a little flower”, “It’s raining it’s pouring”, “Good morning Mr. Sun” before we did the action songs. The action songs included “Heads and shoulders”, “Incey, wincey spider”, “Under the spreading chestnut tree”, “The Wheels on the bus” and “Five little monkeys”. We needed to get rid of some of our excess energy because we couldn’t go to the park.

This morning we made a few pages for our “We’re going on a bear hunt” books. We made the deep, dark forest using twigs that we

collected yesterday in the park together with markers and other collage materials. We used leaves, green paper, brown paper that looked just like the bark on trees and origami paper. We also made the swirling, whirling snowstorm page using cotton wool, glue and glitter. We used our fingers to spread glue onto the page; we pulled the cotton wool to make it thin and fluffy and we loved making the page a bit sparkly with the glue glitter.

Because we had time later in the day, we also made the bear in its cave however we made it separately because our snowstorm page was still wet and sticky. We decided to make the cave and the bear using paper. We could make our bear any colour and were inspired by Kai’s decision to make his bear green. Our teachers thought that bears are brown and were going to cut out shapes just in brown. He said that he wanted a green one so they cut out shapes in other colours and we could choose. We are really having fun for our first week of summer school stories. We are looking forward to completing our books and then being able to take them home and read them to our families.

See you tomorrow for another fun day in summer school.

Shelley, Hisami, Liezel, and Yukhei.