Our evolving art work
Today we arrived at school after a stormy start to the day. We were awoken by the big loud noise of thunder and the crack of lightning in the sky. While we were eating snack, we spoke about this and some of us said that we heard the storm and some of us said that we didn’t hear it. We looked at the sky to confirm the weather for our calendar and we saw that it was clear. The blue was a beautiful sharp, blue and the sun was shining. Shelley: What happened to the rain?
Manuel: It went down
Lanah: It went away, like magic
William L: It went to the sky
Michaela: It went back home. The cloud takes the rain back home. It goes in the cloud
We first asked our teachers where it went but they didn’t know either so we shared our thoughts with them. We are curious about everything and
constantly ask why, where, who, what etc and this time, they asked us the questions.
While some of us were playing in the dress up corner, at the small white table, a few of us drew on white boards using white board markers. We each had our own white board and drew pictures and erased them and drew more pictures and erased them. We love the drawing part but we also love the erasing part.
At the activity tables, we had pegboards with pictures and circular shaped pegs; that we matched on to the appropriate colours.
Our huge art work is almost complete, unless our teachers suddenly come up with a new idea. Today we did some sponge painting on top of paper tape. We tore off pieces of paper tape and stuck them onto the
painting in different places. Then we dabbed paint over the tape using sponges and either blue, red or dark green. When we had finished dabbing the paint, we pulled the tape off the painting and it left interesting patterns. The shape of the patterns that we did with the tape was either horizontal or vertical or diagonal lines. So when we added the black yarn, we attached it using white glue, and made it into swirly undulating shapes. Initially we said that the yarn was like a snake. We mixed our thread of yarn into the glue container, looked for the head or tail of our “snake” and pulled it out. Then we draped it onto the painting. The yarn looked white when it was all covered with glue but
as it dried we saw the black reappear.
Today is Liezel’s baby son, Jordan’s birthday. She is so happy as her husband and two sons are with her here in Japan and she can spend time with them and celebrate Jordan’s 6th birthday. We made pictures for him and Hisami, our birthday card expert, made it into a book for him. We presented the cards so Liezel and looked at the pictures together with her. We told her
which ones we had made and she will give it to Jordan after school today.
We think that Hisami is the best birthday card maker in the whole world. She makes many different shapes and she can even make cards that pop up.
In one of our circle times, we played a number game
using number symbols and pictures. We recognized the numbers all the way from 1 – 20. Some of us may not know the bigger numbers yet, however we have some friends in our class who do and we learnt from them. We all had turns to place them in the correct sequential order and then we looked for the picture that matched them e. g. with one there was a picture of one house; with two there was a picture of two trees etc. We laid out all of the numbers
and matched one, two, three, four, five, six and seven.
Taiyo was the weather person today and you can see that he is wearing his sunhat, because as soon as we completed our calendar, we went to play in the park.
During library time, we sat in a small group and Shelley read “The Monkey Puzzle” and “The Big Hungry Bear”.
We changed our room around just a little, in the dress up area. The back of
our kitchen faces onto the library area. Today we pretended that it was a shop window and we were buying takeaways. Some of us were waiting at the window for our orders.
Shelley went to Komaba today to teach English so she left school early; that’s why the journal is ready earlier than usual. See you tomorrow for the final day working on our group art work and the end of another week.
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel