We love mud

We think that the weather after a typhoon is easily predictable. It happened last week and we were sure that it would happen this week too. The day after the typhoon is a magnificent sunny day and that is what today was. We had a great time playing in the park with nature and spent most of our time, looking for leaves, crumbling them and dropping them into the muddy water. We also loved touching the mud and together with Hisami we made a river connecting two puddles together so the water could flow from one to the other. You can see from the photos what fun we had while observing the veins on the leaves, which is one of the things we learnt about today.

In the morning when we arrived at school, we made ghosts out of newspaper, tissue paper, pipe cleaners, foam shapes and googly eyes. We are all going to have a ghost for our Halloween party which we will use when we sing our ghost song. We played with lovely textured play dough and rolled it over a marker to make it look like one of those cigar cookies which you buy in the store. We also went fishing with fishing rods made out of branches from a tree, fishing wire and magnets. Each of us had a bowl of autumn leaves which had been laminated. On the end of each leaf, there was a paper clip which is made from metal so when you put the magnet from the fishing rod on it, it stuck to it. This is how we caught the fish. We counted the leaves that we caught and counted many.

Just before we went to have our morning circle, we all sat at the activity tables in two groups. Shelley showed us a variety of leaves in different shapes, sizes and colours. We looked at them carefully and noticed the veins on the underside of each leaf. Then we looked at the veins on our own bodies. We looked at the ones on our arms and saw blue lines underneath our skin. We didn’t know that we had something blue inside our bodies. Some of our veins are smooth and some are bumpy. The ones on a leaf are the same; smooth and bumpy.

We looked at the veins on the leaves, through magnifying glasses and observed the shape of them etc. Each of us had a leaf in front of our seat which we tried to draw. From our observations, we were able to draw our leaf or leaves with plenty of detail. Our teachers will write some documentation about this for our display wall and then you can see what we did.

All of us did one of these today and we will show our friends who come to school tomorrow, what they need to do for this activity.

When we sat down for morning circle, we all had a turn to choose an animal and then unpeg it from the display that it was on. Our teachers are thinking carefully about our classroom, how everything is displayed etc. They thought that it would be more fun to play with the animals then look at them. We put them inside the container that has all of our soft toys. Then we spoke about our veins and our skin and how leaves and people have these similar traits. We sang our hello song; looked for our names and placed them onto the magnet board to show that we were at school today. We get ready for the park independently and follow this routine without being told what to do.

Early in the morning during free play time, we played a matching game and we specifically used the charts with the fruit and colours on it. We had to match two that were the same and then we could keep the red plastic lids.

We made this fabulous play dough person with a few friends. Alexis, Lucinda, Lilian and Daiki all helped to make the head and face while Alexis and Lilian made the body.

When we returned from the park, we were quite hot as the day turned out clear and warm, after the typhoon. So we lay down on the carpet and rested and Shelley told us a story about 12 little ghosts that came to play on Halloween night. They met some children who were scared of them but when they spoke to the children, they realized that the children were all scared of them. They reassured the children in the story (and us), that they were friendly ghosts and wanted to have fun with the children. The end of the story was a happy ending and we then sang our song with the 12 ghosts all scary and white, dancing about on Halloween night. Thanks for a fun day at school today.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.