Pumpkin Plants & Colored Balloons

We hope you all had a great weekend and enjoyed the beautiful sunshine. This morning we worked on some surprise birthday cards for our friends in Flowers class. We have two birthdays coming up in December as well as one teacher’s birthday too. We chose a piece of colored card for our friends and then using sparkly pens and colored pencils we decorated a card for each of them. We even turned them over and tried writing the words ‘Happy Birthday’ with our friend’s names. On the big table we continued decorating the balloons for our hot air balloon models. For Jeremy, Jessica and Rico it was the start of our model and so we chose the tissue paper we wanted to use before applying it to a white balloon with some glue. For many of us it was a good opportunity to add some more beautiful tissue color paper to our balloons we started last week. We had to tear some new tissue paper as we soon ran out. We had to be a little careful we tore the paper in the right direction otherwise it wouldn’t make strips. On the carpet the kapla wooden blocks were again popular with us as we could build lots of different kinds of towers and structures. After snack we headed for the small pond near step park as we didn’t really have enough time to get to the usual ‘step park’ today unfortunately. It was a bit chilly out but great fun to look into the water and see the koi carp swimming around. As soon as we got back to school we read a book together called ‘If I could drive a fire truck’. Tomorrow we are visiting the fire station and so we thought it was a good idea to see what firefighters really do when the alarm rings at the fire station. We are really looking forward to visiting them! Next it was time for our weekly exercise session with Tanaka Sensei. We started off with our usual “Ohaiyo Gozaimasu’, our warm up exercises and our stretches. We tried the table pose and even managed to do the pose using either one leg or one hand. We are getting so much better at this, it just takes a little practice and balancing skills. We soon were onto our rolls and managed to do 4 each as well as getting up really quickly before Tanaka sensei finished counting to 3. We then played a game where we walked and when Tanaka Sensei blew the whistle we had to pretend we were making a train and find a partner. The next time we had to find 3 friends and make a 4 person train and finally a whole group train. We managed it really well. Well done Flowers Class! In circle time we all came to the table to see our pumpkin seeds we planted about 2 weeks ago had grown enormous. They are looking really healthy and wanted to take them home. Using a spoon each we first put some soil into a large green cup and then carefully transferred the plants into the cup. Lastly we added some soil to cover the roots and pressed the soil down to hold it all in place. We have no idea if they will survive over the winter in such small pots but are glad to take them home. Have a great afternoon.