The magic of wonder and imagination

Today was our second last gymnastics lesson with Tanaka sensei. We are lucky because he will be back on Thursday for his final lesson with us. These are some of the games that he played with us today besides the usual games and warm up exercises. The car and airplane game – Tanaka sensei said car and we had to jump; when he said airplane and put his arms at his side to look like an airplane, we had to sit on our haunches. The reason for this was that the wings of the airplane could hit us. Touch the colour game – when he said a colour we had to touch something in the room that was that colour and then find a partner and sit together.

Traffic light game – when he said “kiro” which means yellow, we had to walk; when he said “midori” which means green, we had to run and when he said “aka” which means red, we had to stop. When he said “truck” we had to stand against the wall with our backs to the wall.

We enjoyed being crocodiles which is a “wahnee” in Japanese. We crawled on our tummies and went underneath Hisami and Tanaka sensei’s legs and laughed as we pulled our bodies along the floor. We made a large circle when we said ‘orange’ and made a small circle when we said ‘pancake’. We are looking forward to a special lesson with Tanaka sensei on Thursday and we are going to give him a card that we made.

During the morning we did a new experiment with our coffee filters. This time we looked at some of the things that were on the table which were a little different from before. There were four large plastic cups, a container with four coloured boxes in it, coffee filters, a container with water in it and a piece of paper and pencil. We looked at the water and you will see the documentation in our workbooks/portfolios later in the year and we will put it up in our classroom too……it explains the entire conversation that we had about this experiment. The one really interesting part was when Shelley asked us what colour we thought the water was, inside the cups. We told her that it was white but when she put one cup onto a blue lid, some of us told her that it was blue; and when she put it onto a piece of pink paper, some of us said that it was pink; and some of us still said that it was white. Well, we will share with you what the experiment was. So we then added colouring to each container and we watched as the water changed into red, blue, yellow and green respectively. Then we took a white coffee filter and put it one inside each of the cups and watched them change colour. We made many assumptions which again, our teachers documented and you will read which made this whole experience really interesting. Our teachers give us plenty of opportunities to think for ourselves and work things out in our own unique way. This was another “Day in the Life of Petals Class”.

We watched as the coffee filters changed colour and then we took the coloured liquid and poured the leftovers down the drain. We did this only once the coffee filters had completely changed colour. The cups sat on the table at lunch time and we will look at them tomorrow when we come to school and discuss our observations.

Tomorrow we will video the whole thing so that Shelley can document everything that we say. She has been writing as much as she could down but thought about using her phone to record it instead.

We did some cutting during the morning in preparation for our International Month page in our workbooks/portfolios and once Mika has completed hers tomorrow, all of us will be finished and can then paste them into our books.

We started making musical instruments at one of our activity tables which we will use during music time in our classroom. Hisami selected some junk art materials since this is still part of our monthly theme on “Recycling” and we chose what the materials could be. Vincent thought that a box could be a drum and Michaela thought that a bottle with things inside it could be maracas. We had plastic bottles, boxes, string, paper bowls, yarn, markers, tape, origami paper, coloured paper and various materials that were small enough to go inside the bottles and make a sound.

We will all make instruments in the next few days and use them together for our orchestra in the class.

Thanks for another wonderful day at school where we had the opportunity to think and wonder and use our imagination.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel