Birds Nests & Flying Pigs

This morning when we arrived we saw lots of things on the table we don’t usually see inside. There were twigs and leaves which Nanako told us are to make a birds nest each. We were excited because to make the nest we would need to blow up a balloon and build the shape over the top. Nile and Tokutaro tried to blow up the balloons but it was very difficult to do so Nanako helped us. Once the balloon was ready we turned it upside down in a bowl to hold it in position and then started adding glue, newspaper, cardboard, leaves and twigs. We built up lots of layers of paper and cardboard and then put the balloon aside to dry. Next week we will add more layers to the balloon and add more twigs to make it stronger and look nicer too. Next to the nest making we used some wavy scissors to cut some white paper to look like clouds in the sky. We then glued the white clouds onto our little farm models in the sky with the birds. Adam and Alexis also used the paper clay to make another sheep and pig each for the small farms. They will dry enough to put some color on them and add them to our model farms next week. We completed our wooden ‘flying pig’ today too. Today we only needed to attach the pigs body to the crank follower so that the pig moved up and down. Adam also made the curly pigs tail with a pipe cleaner and glued it on. We tested the flying pig and found it all worked. Congratulations everyone, we did a good job! On the carpet there was again a piece of fabric hanging across the room from 2 chairs. Nile immediately settled in with some animal books and was soon joined by her friends bringing lots of toy kitchen materials to play with. On the second table Kosei and Nile used the large sheets of Styrofoam to make farm animals. We firstly looked through a book and decided we wanted to make farm dogs called Border Collies. We could choose if we wanted them running, sitting down etc. Darren explained about the Styrofoam cutter and how it is a tool and not a toy so we needed to be careful and have the teachers help us when using it. We drew on the Styrofoam, cut out the dogs and then glued on wiggly eyes. They look good and will add some black next week. After packing away the toys and eating our yummy snacks we got ready for the park. Usually when we are ready we get a library book but today we started to learn the new words to the Ohana song. When we came to the classroom we read a book called ‘Chickens Fly the Coop’ which was a very funny book about four chickens who wanted to visit the farmhouse but got scared away from the doghouse, the tractor and the barn before eventually finding the farmhouse. We are going to use the Lego wall next week to make some animal pictures and so we then needed to sort the Lego pieces into colored areas and take out the all the star wars, firefighter and boat Lego. It took us quite a while to find just the blocks we could use and will look for animals the right colors on Monday. Have a great weekend, All our love, Darren, Ayaka & Nanako