Bye Bye Sara & Beautiful Butterflies

Dear Flower Class parents, today was a sad day for us all as we had to say Bye-Bye to Sara. Sara is returning to Hawaii this evening with her mommy and daddy and we will all miss her so very much. Today we had a small party after free play with our friends to say a proper bye-bye to Sara. In the first part of the morning we had lots of artwork to complete on the main tables. We did some jungle animal stencil drawings this week and today added some color to the animals. We used colored markers to carefully trace over the pencil lines with the right colors for the animals e.g. we used green marker for the frogs and crocodiles, black for the gorillas, lots of colors for the toucan etc. Once we had gone all around the outlines we then got some green tissue paper and some green cellophane to stick over the drawings just like the animals were in the jungle. To make the tissue paper the right shape we tore the paper downwards and used scissors on the cellophane to cut it into pieces. We then used some glue to attach the pieces to the paper. Also on the table Nanako showed us how we could use food coloring and some small pipettes to make white kitchen paper look very bright and colorful. We could use red, blue, yellow and green on our kitchen paper and practiced filling the pipettes with the colored water and dripping it carefully on the paper. When the colors hit the paper they were absorbed by the paper very quickly and spread a long way. We worked on them again later in circle time once they had dried. On the second table Eito, Gaby and Nile used the animal stencils with some orange and black paint to finish our tiger and gorilla pictures. To apply the paint we used some small art sponges and we will see how they look after the weekend when we peel of the stencil mask. Soon it was time to pack away the toys and prepare for Sara’s party. We sang the Ohana song together, twinkle, twinkle little star, and Where is Thumbkin with our friends. Sara, her father Steve and mother Miyuki arrived to say bye-bye to all us and also brought along a yummy fruit snack for us to eat. Thank you so much Steve and Miyuki. We all sat in a circle and sang our Hello song together and then Riko gave Sara her special card we had made for her along with an Ohana T-Shirt as a gift. We asked Sara some questions and then each of us gave her a big hug. We sang our ‘bye-bye’ song together and took and a big group photo for Sara to take with her to remember us by. Sara had a gift she had made for each of us and wanted to give them to us after her mommy and daddy had gone. Thank you very, very much Sara. The gifts were wonderful. Please take care and come and visit us again soon. We ate the yummy snack and enjoyed the sunshine in the park. In circle time Nanako read a book all about caterpillars and butterflies to us all which we learned a lot from. Nanako also showed us some photographs of the Rainforest in Brazil, the worlds’ largest butterfly and some beautiful butterflies. We then moved to the table to make some origami butterflies and make our colored kitchen paper into beautiful colored butterflies using pipe-cleaners. Have a great weekend,