Planting pumpkin seeds and 'The Giant Turnip'

This morning the big blue train set was very popular on the main carpet. After visiting the train museum yesterday it seems like it peeked all our interest in trains and tracks. We all worked really well together putting the track together and we even put in bridges, a station, a water tower and a coal supply. The track spread across the whole carpet it was so popular!! On the Velcro wall Marc, Eito and Olivia noticed the ‘marble run’ toy was partly set up and ready to attach new pieces to. We added a few pieces and checked as we went along if the ball went where we wanted it to go. On the main table we saw some black paper and some colored chalk alongside a book all about Halloween. The paper looked as black as night and so we drew some of our favorite Halloween images such as spiders webs, bats, Jack-O-Lanterns and skeletons. We used colored chalk on the paper so that we could see the pictures clearly but it was a little dusty to use at first. In Library time Ayaka read “We’re going on a bear hunt’ which is a favorite of the children and always makes them laugh. After clearing away the books we had Nile’s ‘Show & Tell’. Nile brought along one of her favorite books titled ‘The Zebra Crossing’. She told us how the book is about a small boy who doesn’t look carefully when crossing the road and gets hit by a car. His friends and family come to see him in the hospital and the police come to warn everyone at his school about the dangers of crossing the road. Nile then showed us a wonderful bee she had made from a cardboard box and a few other recycled materials. She then answered her friends questions really well. Thank you Nile for a great show and tell. We all sat nicelty for the whole time Nile was telling us about her things and so we needed to move a little to some music. Thinking about the missed potato digging trip yesterday we decided to sing one of our favorite songs; ‘Hot Potato’ which has some funny lines that we can all dance to. Ayaka then re-read the book she read on Tuesday called ‘the giant turnip’ which we all love. We decided to re-enact the scene and could choose which animal or person from the book we wanted to be. Darren sat on the carpet and found some green leaves sticking out from under the carpet. Nile then came to help and each of us chose a person or animal we would like to be: Nile;Grand-daugher, Ava; Cat, Marc;Mouse, Olivia;Grandma, Eito;Dog, Arata;Hero, Adam;Dog, Miles;Spider, Riko;Mouse, Kosei;Dog. We then all pulled adding more and more of friends. Eventually it came out but we were surprised t see it was actually a giant pumpkin. We soon got onto talking about pumpkins, Jack-O-Lanterns and Halloween. We wanted to know why pumpkins are made into Jack-O-Lanterns. To find out we looked in the book ‘Halloween’. We discovered how they are filled with seeds. We had some seeds from previously and decided to see if they would grow at this time of year. Bringing in the pots from outside we saw there were leaves growing in the pots but sadly when we pulled them up there were no potatoes or pumpkins under the surface. We decided to then plant the seeds in the soil pots and watch and see if they sprout. It was a bit of a messy job but fun. To finish our ‘magical’ morning we decided to do some magic with the missing coin which reappeared behind Mile’s ear which was fun. Have a great afternoon. All our love, Darren, Ayaka and Jen