Orange and black....what is coming soon?

Today was a day filled with orange and black. We recognize these colours as representative of Halloween and so we proceeded to learn and have fun and be creative with our teachers and our friends. We had one table with orange and black collage and drawing materials on it. Our task was to draw whatever we wanted to and then paste collage onto our picture to complete it. Our teachers are encouraging us to think about what we want to draw and when we do this, we are amazed at what we can create. Today Vincent drew his mum and an airplane; Lucinda drew a Halloween mum; Alexis made a pumpkin; Mika made her mum, Koh made a monster; William B made a snake; Daiki made his mum too; Miyu made her mum too. We all have a particular way of drawing and using the collage materials and we also thought carefully about where we wanted to put the collage materials on our page.

Hisami sat with us as we made the rest of our Halloween party trick or treat containers. Those of us who were not at school yesterday cut along the line and then pasted some black shapes on to the orange paper, before we attached it to our cups. We added handles which were made out of pipe cleaners and some of us used paper for them.

On the small table in the free play area of the classroom, we had a large chart with patterns on it. There were four chairs and each one had a string with one bead on one end, which was the anchor bead. We chose a pattern on the chart and made the same pattern on our strings with beads. We had to look carefully at the colours of the beads, the shapes and the number. You can see that we worked conscientiously and were able to match the patterns with the designs that we created on our string.

Miyu and Lucinda both brought books for us to read today. The one that Miyu brought was in Japanese and the one that Lucinda brought was in English. Before we read the stories, we changed our calendar as today is Thursday. We are learning the words yesterday, today and tomorrow so that we can try to work out which day it is. If we know which day was yesterday and we know the days of the week, consecutively, we can work out what today is. Sometimes our teachers give us clues by saying the sound of the first letter. Usually we are able to guess the name then.

Today our friends in Buds class only have three children so they joined us when we went to the park. So many children are sick at the moment and we hope that they get better soon and come back to school. Yesterday when our teachers were putting up the documentation on the wall, about our leaf drawings, we watched them and looked to see if we could find our own ones. We enjoy looking at our names now because we are able to recognize them and anything with our name on it, draws our attention. We also like to look at things that we have made in a similar way, we like to look at ourselves and our families in our Life Books. We are really enjoying looking at all of our friends now and can’t wait for the few outstanding ones to arrive at school, soon.

Shelley went to Komaba for her monthly English lesson there so she left early and we had lunch with our friends and Hisami and Liezel. Some of the activities that we will do tomorrow will be the same, so that our friends, who attend on a Friday, can have a chance to make what we did today.

We have so many events coming up and are excited for Sweet Potato Digging, Taiko and then Halloween.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.