Painting fun

Our day started off with rain and we were wondering whether we would be able to go to the park and…………….luckily, the sun peeped from behind the clouds and we could go and play outside. Our teachers are in a dilemma because we experience the cold, very differently from the way that they do. They look outside and see clouds and feel the air, and they then dress accordingly. We just do what we want to do, despite the weather. So if we want to play outside, we do not think about being cold or hot, we just think about playing. While we walk to the park in our jackets, we almost always, take them off as we “overheat”. We completed our “chitose-ame” bags today by turning our white handprints into a crane or “tsuru” in Japanese. We pasted four black “feathers” onto the place where our four fingers were on the bag. Our thumb became the head of the crane. We pasted a beak and some of us drew the circular part as well. Hisami wrote our names in Hiragana so maybe we will start to recognize our names in English and Japanese now.

We painted on large pieces of paper and love just mixing colours and making a mush on our page. Sometimes our teachers ask us to paint something discernible and we are able to follow instructions when this happens. When Vincent arrived at school this morning, he told his teachers what colours there were inside the paint containers and then he counted them all. Alexis made a painting and then

saw that her friends were just playing with the colours, so she painted over it. She then decided to make another one and this time she painted a rainbow. Lucinda painted all of the members of her family and told Shelley that when it was dry, she will take it home.

During one of our circle times, we sat together and looked at some plastic people who were specifically dressed in clothes that indicate what their profession is. We had a fireman, a policewoman, a painter, a grandma, a teacher, a doctor, a farmer, a mailwoman, a chef/baker. We all took one of the characters and when we sang our good morning song, we all sang our part of the song as if we were the character e. g. Koh was a doctor just like he was when it was Halloween; Alexis was a teacher etc. We spoke about the people in the neighbourhood and what they do each day. In fact, on the way back from the park, a man was sweeping leaves outside a place called the “Kano Glass Studio”. Hisami asked him what he does at his glass studio and he said that made art from glass. She also asked him if we can go into his studio to see what he does, and he said “yes”. We plan to do this one day.

We spent part of the morning doing floor puzzles which we really loved. We worked as a team, usually with one other child. One of the puzzles was a picture of farm animals; one was a huge map of the continents of the world and one of them was an alphabet puzzle. Once the alphabet puzzle was complete, we all gathered around and looked for the letter that represented the initial sound of our names e. g. Daiki looked for “d”; Alexis looked for “a” etc. Even though our teachers explained to us that our names start with an upper case letter, we were able to find the lower case letters that matched our names. We also looked for the letters of our teachers names. We sang the alphabet song.

On our return from the park, we read a really big book called “Today is Monday”. We played a memory game with the story. Each time we read about another day, we tried to remember what happened the day before e. g. On Monday the porcupine ate string beans; on Tuesday the snake ate spaghetti; on Wednesday the elephant ate zoop etc. At least one of us was able to remember what animal there was on each day and what they ate.

We can almost remember all of the days of the week and are now trying to remember the months of the year. We know October because it was last month and are not trying to remember November, which is this month.

Our teachers have been using the office area for our art work so we have not been able to ‘work’ there lately. Tomorrow we will make our own “meishi” so that we can introduce ourselves to our friends. We will also focus on the “mailman/mail lady” and letters, envelopes and stamps.

See you tomorrow for the last day of a short week.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.