Examining nature

Our rainy day today meant that we were able to play at many of our activities without being interrupted. Our teachers also let us pack away things in their containers and leave the things that we were in the middle of doing, for us to continue working on later. We stopped for our traditional meal times and our circle times were flexible during the day.

At the activity tables, we made origami “donguri” and we learnt how to fold our own acorns. First we looked at real acorns and leaves through magnifying glasses. We noticed that they have little patterns on the leaves. We also noticed that the acorns have some shading on them. You can see from the photos that even though Hisami told us that we can look at the acorns from a distance through the magnifying glasses, we wanted to get as close as possible.

We also looked at the shell of a cicada. We learnt that a cicada spends most of its lifetime, under the ground. When it is under the ground, it does not need to fly therefore it does not have wings. When it comes above the ground, only then, does it need wings. First it crawls out of its shell and then it spreads its new body and wings and flies away.

With detailed instruction from Hisami, we were able to do everything by ourselves. We made faces on them and will put them into our workbooks/portfolios tomorrow, together with our Autumn/Fall paintings. Our teachers are letting us paste our work into our books because we can!

We played with new wooden blocks that have been kept in their natural shape. The blocks were cylinders, logs, and circular shapes with annual rings on them. We enjoyed the feel of the blocks and the smell. They smelled a bit like real wood; and they are real wood.

In our first circle time, we looked at the calendar and changed the month to October. We said goodbye to September and then changed the date and the weather. Shelley asked us if we knew what number we should use for the date, because it was the first of October. Mika thought really carefully and she said: “Number one”. So we put number one next to October and then we chose the word, rainy and a picture with rain and an umbrella. We then looked at one of the puzzles that we made during the morning. It had a picture of “Little Red Riding Hood” on it. Yesterday Lucinda did the puzzle and she said that she would bring her “Little Red Riding Hood” puppets to school today; and she did. So once the puzzle was completed and we identified the characters, we listened to the story with the puppets. We loved having puppets in our story today because it brought the story to life. One of our activities later in the day was drawing on an easel which Hisami had made by putting a table on its side. She then thought about making the table into a sort of puppet theatre and did another puppet show for us using more of the finger puppets. We joined her too. We used markers and crayons to draw on the easel which was a really large piece of paper. We can continue drawing on it tomorrow so that some of our other friends can have a turn. In our second circle time, we looked at our names and tried to find the first letter. We had a selection of magnetic letters and when we spotted our letter, we placed it on the magnet board next to our name. We added buttons with pipe cleaners to our weaving art work and we also tied some bit of string to it. We then wanted to do threading and make necklaces and bracelets which took a long time. We chatted while making them and some of us will give ours to our mums for a present.