Patterns

It was such a lovely day outside today. We went on two separate ropes to the park and one group went earlier and the other group left the park later. Downstairs we take a little longer to get ready that’s why we left the park earlier so that we could be on time for lunch with our friends upstairs. At one time, when we were playing in the park, four of us were on the swings together. We love the feeling of flying in a soft breeze and it is sometimes hard for us to give the swings to other children; however we have learnt about sharing and we stopped our swings and gave them to some children from another school. We also spent time walking up the large slide while holding hands with our teachers. Then we came whooshing down the slide together. Upstairs we started learning about patterns. In our morning circle time we used coloured dominoes and made a pattern together with red, then blue, then red, then blue and we all had a turn to continue the pattern for a while. Then we did double colours e.g. red, red, blue, blue etc. Then we took any colours that we wanted to and made our very own patterns.  We see many patterns in life each day. We see the patterns that the bricks make on the wall and on the ground near the elevator; we see patterns on the skin of an apple; we see patterns on paper; on clocks; on people’s hands etc. Downstairs we have had fun photocopying our hands and then making individual and group collages with them. Today we spoke about whose hands are bigger and we think that our teacher’s hands are the biggest ones. Some of our friends made their own pictures last week, using their photocopied hands and prints from different animals and today Shoko, Sophie and Miya did theirs.

We had another activity downstairs which was centered around learning about circles. We used circle shapes last week when we made people out of shapes that we pasted onto cellophane paper and today we drew on a large circle shape and we pasted different sized circles onto the large shape as well. Upstairs our friends had a secret table activity using markers, pastels, sparkly pens and stickers.

Our story times were really busy as we both read two stories in each classroom. Darren read “Too big for diapers” and “The potty book for boys” and Shelley read “The friendly lion” and Sabine read “The Tooth book”. Some of us remembered to bring our toothbrushes, toothpaste and cups as we are going to be learning how to brush our teeth carefully each day, after lunchtime. When all of our friends have brought their toothbrushes etc, we will start our tooth brushing schedule. It may take a long time for us to brush our teeth but our teachers do not mind as it is important for us to take care of our teeth and our bodies in every way.

In our morning circle time with Shelley we sang our “Hello” song; “I’m looking to see who is clapping their hands…….” and then we said good morning in English, Japanese, French, German and “Australian”. The way people say good morning in Australia is really funny. They say “G’day mate”! Then we sang “Open them, shut them” and “Tommy Thumb”. Even if we do not remember all of the words of the songs, we remember all of the actions and sometimes we do them before the words! Thanks for our first fun day in October!

Love Shelley, Darren, Kanako and Sabine