Boxes are still the best toys

Welcome back Gento kun! It was such a beautiful day today and so warm. When we went to the park, our teachers took our warm sweaters off so that we would not “over heat” and we had a great time. We ran and climbed and sat on the swing and played with balls and invited some friends who were playing with their mums, to share our toys. We even filled containers up with water just like we did throughout the summer. On the second floor, we had many things to do and even though our concentration span is not too long, we were able to complete our activities and follow through all of our routines.

Our first activity was an orange and black collage. Shelley doesn’t really talk about Halloween as she thinks that the most relevant part of it for us, is the dressing up in fancy dress. In our classroom there is a large pumpkin light and some orange and black material on the ceiling. Our focus at the moment, together with Health and Hygiene is also Fall/Autumn and the beautiful colours that we see as the leaves change and the weather becomes cooler. Yesterday in the park, we collected many leaves and our teachers were wondering what to do with them. 

Kana had a great idea and today she cut out large leaves from a contact sheet. This was a tricky activity as the plastic is sticky and every time we touched it, our hands felt the stickiness. We put the real leaves on the contact sheet together with some leaves that our teachers printed on the computer; and some small sparkly ones in red, silver, purple, blue and green.

We also practiced brushing our teeth today. We put some water inside our cups; our teachers helped put toothpaste on our brushes and then we brushed. We sang

“Brush, brush, brush your teeth, brush your teeth today

If you want to brush your teeth, brush your teeth this way”.

Some of us really like the taste of the toothpaste and we asked our teachers to put more on the brush for us.

Upstairs we made ghosts and bats which we will use to decorate our classroom for our Halloween party. For the bats, we folded a black piece of paper that Darren had drawn half a bat on. When we cut the shape out and opened it up, we saw that it was a whole bat. We pasted googly eyes on them and drew a mouth using a pale coloured pencil. We realized that if we drew with a black marker on the black paper, we wouldn’t be able to see it. We made our Halloween ghosts by tearing old curtains up. There was a strange sound when we tore the material. We the squeezed some newspaper up and we put the material over it so that it became the ghosts head. We had already made eyes and a mouth on the material before we did this. We wrapped a rubber band around the material, underneath the head to hold the newspaper ball in place. We had a really fun time this morning using empty boxes in our free play time. Oliver pretended that he was a robot; Finn wanted to be a train driver. We took turns twisting on the massage spinner.

We read a story about apples and spoke once more about the things that we get from apples. We all love to eat apples especially when they are crunchy, juicy and sweet.

Love Shelley, Darren and Kanako