Its raining pumpkins

Today we had so many things to do that kept us busy on another rainy day here in Tokyo. We had a huge cardboard Jack-o-lantern shape on the table, with orange paint. We had a selection of interesting painting tools; we had sticks with towels on the end which looked like marimba sticks, rollers and brushes. We painted the huge piece of thick cardboard and added some yellow and gold to it. We also sprinkled glitter on it, so it is beautiful and sparkly. We had it on the balcony drying during the morning but then we were worried that the rain and moisture in the air would make it damp so we brought it inside. While we were outside on the balcony, we looked at our skeleton, bat and cat that have been growing inside our water trough. We couldn’t believe how big they have grown. We touched them and the cat and bat felt spongy while the skeleton was hard.

We did one more thing while we were on the balcony; we put our gel shapes for Halloween up on the Perspex. You can see the shapes from the street and from inside our classroom. We first put them onto the mirrors in our classroom and then moved them to the balcony.

We did music during the morning and learnt the musical notes from doh to soh. Hisami explained to us that we have the alphabet from “A to Z” in English; in a Japanese we have hiragana and in music we have “Do to so”. We sang all the notes on the scale. We did dancing to music and sang “Heads and shoulders”, “Five little monkeys”, “Under the spreading chestnut tree”, “Incy Wincy spider” and “Old MacDonald”. There were many more songs and we didn’t want to stop dancing on this cold and rainy day. Daiki sang with such a big voice.

Daiki actually had Show and Tell this morning and he brought a Japanese book to school. It is about a cat that wouldn’t go to sleep. It went to a friend’s house to play but all of the friends didn’t want to play because it was dark outside and they wanted to sleep. Eventually he gave up looking for a friend to play with and he went to sleep. It sounds a bit like some of us, when we don’t want to go to bed at night. We had so many questions to ask Daiki about his book and he answered them all confidently.

We played our game using the puffy tissue paper flowers and fans. Shelley put a barrier on the sides of the table so that the fluffy flower would not fall off the table. We loved playing the game and look forward to playing again tomorrow.

After we had completed our one circle time, we went back to the tables and cut out a selection of leaves which were drawn on green, brown, red, yellow and orange paper. We sat and concentrated while cutting on the lines that we drawn. We will paste them tomorrow on a large group collage.

Do you know how we got two pumpkins today? Hmmmmmm, we think that you can work it out. Yes, you are right! We painted the large pumpkin which was placed on newspaper and when we had finished the pumpkin, we painted the newspaper where there were spaces. When we lifted the large pumpkin up, to dry it, we saw a whole other pumpkin on the newspaper. This is called the negative shape. The positive shape is the pumpkin and the negative shape is what was on the newspaper.

We played Halloween games with Hisami and Liezel while Shelley took some people around the school. We looked at a plain pumpkin and said what was missing in order for it to be a Jack-o-lantern. By chance, Hisami had all of the pieces that we were looking for. So we all had a turn to put on some eye pads, so that we couldn’t see and we placed some of the parts onto the pumpkin in order to make it into a Jack-o-lantern.

Vincent brought a book from home for us to read. We kept it and will read it the day after tomorrow because of our excursion. It is called ‘Pete the Cat’.

See you tomorrow for our excursion to get yummy sweet potatoes. If it is raining, (and Shelley is wishing and saying that it will be a sunny day) which is probably not going to become reality, we will go to the Railway museum.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.