Rainy days are always fun at school

We were all ready to go outside this morning and then, our friends from Buds Class came racing back to school as it started to rain when they were in the park. Oh dear! What were we going to do? Our teachers are all prepared for these kinds of things and so we all sat together on the large carpet and had a conversation about Halloween. We looked inside a Halloween treasure box and found so many things that we can use when we decorate our classroom for our Halloween party. At the moment we are learning about other things, which our teachers feel is more important for our classroom displays. We will however tell you what we found in the box. We found a spider, Jack-o-lantern trick or treat buckets, skeleton, a cat, a bat, a spiders web, some decorations for the windows, a ghost made out of paper and cloth and lots more things.

When we were finished looking inside the box, we used some of the things for our activities that became our “rainy day activities”. We found a cat, skeleton, bat and ghost that grow when you put them into water. We decided that we would use the skeleton, the bat and the cat and we dropped them into our water trough and watched and waited. Even though our teachers said that we need to wait about 10 days before they grow to their full size, we looked at them to see if they had grown. But, they had not! We will look at our puzzles of our bodies tomorrow as the bottom layer of them, is a skeleton.

We went to the tables and made our “trick or treat” bags using paper cups and plastic cups together with orange paper. We cut along lines which Hisami had drawn on a piece of orange paper. Then we pasted black triangles and some other shapes to make it look similar to a Jack-o-lantern. The shape of the paper was really interesting because when you pushed it down, it looked just like a lantern.

We also made some balls out of newspaper and black tissue paper. We squeezed the newspaper into balls and then wrapped it in black tissue paper. We will use the balls for one of our games that we will play at our Halloween party.

During the morning, Luka, Nina, Koh and Miyu did their leaf drawings using pencils. They looked really carefully at their leaves and drew a replica on their paper. Our leaf drawings are on the wall and Shelley will write some documentation about them so that you understand how we made them.

We did some animal puzzles at one of the other activity tables and we did some leaf fishing. We counted the leaves when we had picked them all up and there were so many, we were not sure of the numbers that came next. At the table in the back part of our room, we played the memory game which we love. We took a few different categories today and eventually managed to match all the pictures with their partners.

We changed the calendar and sang “There are seven days in a week” and then we looked at our names and found them, and ran as quickly as we could, to put them onto the magnet board to show that ‘We are here today’. We found 10 small laminated pumpkins in our Halloween treasure box so we learnt and sang the song “1 little, 2 little, 3 little pumpkins

4 little, 5 little, 6 little pumpkins

7, 8, 9 and 10 little pumpkins

For Halloween”

We also stood up together holding our white ghosts that we made the other day and sang “10 little ghosts all scary and white”. We listen very carefully to the words and watch our teachers as they give us a cue when it is our turn to make our ghost go “out of sight”. We now know that out of sight means to disappear. We hide our ghost behind our back when it is our turn.

Hisami read us a book that Miyu chan brought to school about a little boy who was born really tiny. A blue “oni” gave him a magic sword which gave him the ability to make a wish and it came true. His wish was to grow and be big like we are and it was granted.

The rain made us so busy inside that we forgot to do “Show and Tell”. When we woke up from rest time, we were going to do it then, but Lilian said that she wanted to do it rather on Friday. We are excited to see what she has hidden inside her bag…….hmmmmmmm!

We hope that everyone stays warm and dry on this really cold and rainy day here in Tokyo. See you tomorrow!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.