Pinata making and Grandma's visit

This morning we welcomed Eito’s mother Chiharu to the classroom during our free play time. She had brought along some newspaper, two bags of flour, some balloons and tissue paper bows. We wondered what we were going to make with all these materials and then we realized that by blowing up the balloons that we were going to make piñata’s. The first thing we did was to mix the flour with water in two large bowls to make a kind of sticky glue. We used our hands to mix it and were surprised that it felt cold and sticky which was fun. Next we tore the sheets of newspaper into lots of lots of pieces. Using our hands we smothered lots of the flour and water onto the balloons. Together we then helped cover the balloons with the strips of newspaper. Every time we put on a layer of newspaper we had to put some more glue on. It was a messy and sticky activity but we soon had it finished and needed to let it dry before doing any more on the balloons. On the second table Chiharu had prepared lots of orange tissue paper flowers for us to make together. They looked like bows and all we needed to do was to open the sheets of orange tissue paper to make the beautiful flowers. We finished a whole bag together. We put the balloon piñatas outside to dry and will do some more work on them on Monday. Thank you Chiharu, it was a wonderful activity for the children and we all enjoyed it so much. Ethan and Ryan both made their ‘Trick or Treat’ bags for next weeks Halloween party using the colored cloth, yarn and sparkly pipe-cleaners. They look great, well done guys!! After clearing away the toys and eating our snack we got ready for the park and when we sat outside ready to go we all went over our fire drill procedures using questions and answers e.g. “What is the first thing we should do if we see a fire”? - Yes, shout “Fire, Fire”. “Should we use the elevator”? -“No”. “What should we do next”? – “Leave the room and go down the stairs”. “What should we do with our hands”? – “Cover our mouths”. “Why”? – “To stop the smoke getting in”. We headed straight for the park and it was beautiful weather. We checked on the garden flowers in the park and then played in the sand box together. When we got back from the park we were very lucky to have Heather and her friend Barbara with us. Heather is Ethan and Ryan’s grandmother from Australia. We started our circle time by singing our usual good morning song and then Heather read a wonderful story for us called “The Fox and the Crab’. The story is about a crab which leaves his home in the rock pool and goes to the meadow because he is bored with being in the rock pool all the time. We then sang along to a wonderful song called “Waltzing Matilda”. This was a great song for the children and they all joined in for the chorus and clapped their hands to the melody. The song Heather explained was about a man who picked up a sheep and put it in his backpack, the farmer and a policeman arrived and tried to catch the man who jumped into the pond to escape. We had some good questions about Australia and found we had a book called ‘Wombat Stew’ all about Australian animals such as a dingo, koala and a dingo. Thank you Heather and Barbara, it was wonderful to see you and hear your wonderful singing voices. Please come and visit us again soon. Have a great weekend. All our love, Darren, Ayaka and Nanako