A new month.....insects and cherry blossoms
We had a busy day thinking about the beautiful cherry blossoms in our neighbourhood and making pictures of them on a piece of paper. We love painting and today we used pink and brown paint. The brown paint is the tree trunk or branches and the pink represents the cherry blossoms. The cherry blossoms that we saw on the trees in our neighbourhood look white from a distance; however when you look 
closely at them, they have a pinkish tinge. We made the branches with brown paint which was quite thin and runny. We put a blob of paint onto our page and then moved the page up and down to make a few branches in different directions. Then we dipped our finger into pink paint and made our cherry blossoms, on the
branches. We counted the petals on real cherry blossoms; there are five, so we made five petals. Our fingers were full of pink paint.
At the second activity table, we planted seeds. These seeds just grow into plants without flowers. The seeds are birdseed; people usually feed them to their birds and the birds eat it. We didn’t eat it because 
we are not birds but we planted it into soil. Luka said: “This is dirt”. Some of us liked the smell of the soil because it really reminded us of the earth and nature. First we looked for our very own cup. Each cup had a photograph on it with a photo of our teachers and all of the children in our class. Once we had found our cup, we sat 
down and filled it with soil to about three quarters. Then we sprinkled seeds on top of the soil and some more soil on top of the seeds. We sprinkled some water on them and we will wait and see what happens. The seeds will grow tall and straight and the idea is that the pots will look like us with long green hair coming out of 
our heads…..hahaha!
During the morning, we spoke about taking our marble run down and so we did. We had a lot of fun pulling the rolls down, tearing the paper off the wall and helping each other. Our teachers heard our laughter and enjoyment while they were working with our friends at the activity tables. They joked that we were a really good demolition team.
We had a long discussion today about Insects. Our teachers really
don’t like giving us answers to many questions and they often ask us what we think. But sometimes, they need to tell us a word because we may not have heard it before. Today we looked at a book that had bees in it, another one with a butterfly in it and a large plastic ant. 
Shelley first asked us if we knew what a bee was. Was it a person? No. Was it an animal? No. Well then what was it. We were not sure what the collective word for bees, butterflies, ants etc was. So we counted the legs of the ant and counted six; then we counted the legs of a bee and there were six too. The butterfly also had six legs. All of them have two antennae so they had quite a lot in common. We looked at the wings of the butterflies and 
the bees and discovered one more thing in common; that was their wings. They both have two pairs of wings which means that they have four wings, two on each side. The ant cannot fly but all three can walk. We sang “Here is the beehive” and used the soft toy beehive with individual bees, that we have in our classroom (thanks Lilian and Christine). We looked at the bees and remembered 
the song that we love singing at the moment…..”Two little bees one day” and of course we laughed when we heard the words pom pom. We had a long discussion and Vincent told us that bees live in a hive and make honey. William L said that “Pooh san” likes honey so we learnt another fun song with actions. It is more of a poem and goes like this:
“Isn’t it funny that a bear likes honey,
Buzz, buzz, buzz, I wonder why he does?
Go to sleep Mr. Bear”
The person who is the bear pretends that he is eating honey while we are saying the words and then he goes to sleep. We wait a few seconds and then shout: “Wake up Mr. Bear” and he has to wake up and chase us. The person that he catches then becomes the bear. We ran around and were really excited and excitable, as you can imagine. We hope that we can play this game tomorrow and maybe in the park underneath the cherry blossoms.
We changed our calendar to April 1st. Often all around the world, people play jokes on one another on this day, but we didn’t.
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel