Tanabata and treasure hunt at the park

We hope that everyone had a beautiful weekend and you were able to enjoy the beautiful weather! This morning when we came in to the class, we saw some strips of paper and stars along with some paint. Some of us decided to use paint first. We put some stars on top of the white strips and used our fingers to flick the paint on the paper from a brush. When we removed our stars, some of our strips had white star silhouettes. Riko’s star came out very nicely. Our fingers were covered in paint, but we liked how the brush stroked through our fingers softly… Next to our messy fun paint craft, we saw some green paper, scissors and straws. We folded the green paper in half, and started to cut lines with our wiggly scissors. Wiggly scissors were much harder to cut with compared to the straight scissors, but we managed using them pretty well. Rolling the green paper on the straw was another story… We taped an edge of our green paper on to the straw, and tried to roll it, but every time we rolled the straw, the paper kept flipping over to its original place. So with some help from the teachers, we made a beautiful bamboo stem for Tanabata, the Japanese star festival. The strips we splattered paint on will be our ‘make a wish’ card when they are dry.

While our friends were busy with the craft, we waited for our turn by building block mazes for the cars. Gaby, who remembered what we did last week, was making another hand print in the play dough and said “Movie stars!” She remembered that we made hand prints just like ones in Holloywood that real movie stars made.

When we got to the park, we saw many small orange balls on the ground. They were “BBs”, the plastic pellets! We quickly started to gather them and soon had a handful, so we decided to keep them all in a plastic bag. Since they were yellowish-orange, and reminded us of the stars, we thought we’d to take them back to school and use them as craft materials for our theme this week, “Stars and Moon”! Kai found so many BBs, we had to chase after Tokutaro who was holding the plastic bag for all of us.

While we were gathering the BBs, Tokutarou and Kosei found a tiny mushroom at the park. We know that some mushrooms are poisonous, and we shouldn’t touch them (or eat them!) if we don’t know what kind of mushroom they are. Some of us found baby green persimmons too!

It was a perfect day for our treasure hunt.

Have a great afternoon, All our love, Maki, Darren, and Bill