Welcome Back and our New friend Sara

Welcome back everyone, we trust you had a good break and were able to enjoy the beautiful weather over the spring break. It was great to see all the children return from the break looking refreshed with big smiles on their faces. This morning we welcomed a new friend to Flowers class; Sara. Welcome Sara, it is great to have you with us all the way from Hawaii. Sara will be with us for about a month and she has already started to make new friends. On the main art table today we could do some watercolor painting. The watercolor paints are all in little tubes and so we needed to gently squeeze some of the paint into the palette before mixing it with water. We painted all kinds of things including rainbows, mount Fuji and Flowers. This paint doesn’t take very long to dry and we could take our artwork home today. Next to the painting area on the table was the big red light-box with some ‘jobs’ pictures on the top. Using the light-box we firstly chose one of the jobs cards and then placed a sheet of white paper over the top. Using some masking tape we then taped the white copy paper into place and using a pencil started to trace the outlines. Sara and Jennifer did a great job with this and their work was very accurate. The musician in Jennifer’s picture didn’t have an instrument and so Jennifer drew one in for him. On the carpet Alexis used the K-Nex construction set to make a giant snowflake from the long pieces while Gaby enjoyed dressing up like Snow White while playing with the toy animals. Riko found her life book and told the teachers who the people were in the photos as well as showing us a hand print she did in 2012. She compared her hand now and it was bigger than before. Lucinda finished coloring her occupations (Future Dentist) artwork and we mounted it on the wall next to all her friends work. After packing away the toys we did a small circle time to review today’s date, day and month as well as a song to introduce us to our new friend Sara. We then had snack and Nanako read a book titled Oliver’s Vegetables about a boy’s search for potatoes. We headed for the park eagerly today as we could see it was a beautiful day outside. Some of the cherry trees have started to blossom and they looked beautiful today. Many of us collected cherry blossom flowers in the park bowls from the park bag. We hope to use them in some artwork soon. When we came back from the park we did a small circle time where we looked at a model of Arata climbing a ladder using lollipop sticks, yarn, small pieces of straw and cardboard cutouts. We then moved to the table to make one of ourselves. We started by gluing our own faces to the cardboard cutout and then drawing on some clothes. Some of us drew pants and t-shirts while others drew nice flowery dresses. We then attached 2 small pieces of straws to the back side by side using tape. We chose a lollipop stick and then attached 2 long pieces of yarn using some more tape. We threaded the yarn through the straw pieces and when we pulled the 2 pieces apart our cardboard model began to rise up and up. Have a great afternoon.