Nature and insects

It was a lovely day at school today with some more new and interesting things to see and learn about. Luka brought along a real bee and a real snail to show us. They were in separate containers because the bee was dead and the snail was alive. We all stood around the small white table and looked through magnifying glasses at the bee and the snail. We were amazed to see them become really big when you looked through the magnifying glasses. We could see the bees wings which were almost transparent; the hair on his body and his legs and antennae. We couldn’t believe how long his antennae were. We also saw the stripes on the bees body. The container that had the bee in it had a sealed lid on top of it. The container with the snail inside it had soil, leaves, lettuce, and the lid of a plastic bottle filled. There was no lid on top of the bottle but a piece of paper with holes in it. Luka told us that the snail needed to breathe that’s why there were holes in the paper and no lid. You may be surprised to see the picture of a caterpillar next to the one of the bee. Luka didn’t bring a caterpillar to school today but when Manuel was leaving, we saw that he had something moving on his shoulder. It was wiggling like a worm and when we looked closely, we saw that it was a caterpillar. He didn’t really like having it on his shoulder, so we took it off and placed it inside a plastic container with some lettuce from the snail jar. We hope that he will be happy with the lettuce during the night and that he will still be there tomorrow morning when we come to school.

The other special thing that we had today was “Show and Tell”. It was Taiyo’s turn today and he brought along one of his favourite books called “Spot says goodnight”. Taiyo’s dad wrote a beautiful story about the book and how much Taiyo loves it.

During the morning we had a few activities to do at the tables. Miyu completed her numeracy sorting box as well as her small bee and ultimately her dioarama. Koh chan put his bee inside his diorama and we are just waiting for our friend William B to come to school on Friday so that he can complete his diorama.

Hisami sang our Japanese song about seeds and fruit and vegetables with us. We each had a turn to plant a pretend seed and then we found our fruit or vegetable that we made and pretended to eat it. We love learning things using props and since there are a lot of Japanese words in this song, it helps a lot to have our own fruit and vegetables and seeds; we understand the song now. Hisami uses lots of actions and these help us with our understanding of the words too.

We spent time in the park and enjoyed playing outside in the fresh air. Some of us wore hats to the park because it was a little sunny at the time.

We had a fun table with Liezel today, using plastic bottles, cotton wool, glitter, food colouring, and water. We first poured water into one of the bottles, added food colouring and then cotton wool and glitter. We noticed how the cotton wool sank to the bottom and the glitter floated on the top. The second time, we filled the bottle half way and did the same. Then we filled it all the way to the top and we saw how the colours separated a little. We used green, red, orange and we made purple too, using red and blue. We tried it in a large bottle but it was too big, so Shelley took it to the kitchen and poured all of the liquid out. When she shook the bottle, the cotton wool also came out and the funny thing was, that when she squeezed the cotton wool, all of the colour came out of it. So she gave white, wet cotton wool to Liezel for our other bottles. We taped the lids tightly so that we can shake the bottles without any liquid escaping.

Yes this is a silly, funny picture. Hana asked Shelley to help her put this princess outfit on, so Shelley thought that she would try it on first. You can see on our faces, that we were either not impressed or we thought it was quite funny! Some of us spent some time drawing on really large pieces of paper and at the end of the day, we rolled them up to take them home. See you tomorrow!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel