A real sensory experience

We are so happy to know that our friends and teachers will be back at school next week after being sick for a long time and also being in their home country. Sabine is looking forward to seeing us all as she missed us so much when she was in Germany. She read the journal every day so that she could see what we were doing at school. Today was sooooo cold and when we arrived at the park we noticed something different. What was it? When we went into the sand box, it felt squishy and soft under our feet. Why was this? Well, then we looked at the sand and we noticed that the level of the sand went all the way up to the ledge. There was a whole lot of new sand in the sandbox. Tokutaro and Eva saw the truck with sand in it and two strong men were scooping it up into their shovels and throwing it into the sandbox for us. One of them was smoothing it out as well. It was fun to walk on the sand and some of us thought that it felt soft like snow; except the colour was completely different. Snow is white and the sand is dark brown. Eva completed her sensory box using her special things that she brought to school last week. She had a lovely branch and some acorns which she added to the sand and large leaves. We all put a few pine cones inside the box as well. Tokutaro added his things as well. He had some lovely seed pods and leaves. We will help Shoko chan do hers on Monday and Gento kun can make his on Tuesday.

We also did some painting with orange, yellow, red and brown paint on large sheets of paper. We used rollers and shaving brushes. We tried to roll the paint along the paper with the rollers and with the shaving brushes, we dabbed and stamped them on the paper. When Shelley said to the children stamp the paint, Eva started to stamp her feet. When we are little sometimes we remember a word in one context and only think of it in this way. Stamping for us means, stamp our feet! We have started helping one another and are learning to share things. We went to the bathroom all by ourselves to wash our hands without our teachers asking us. As you can see from the photo, it was a little challenging for us to do it without the help of our teachers.

We had a real sensory experience upstairs with the paper clay. We remembered that we had shredded paper a long time ago using the hand shredder. Last week we placed the shredded paper into a bucket of water and today we took it out of the bucket and mixed it with starch based glue. It felt cold and soft and smooth and ……..Some of us thought that it looked like a green cake and a red cake as these were the two colours that we used for it. We pressed the mixture into moulds that were shaped like a circle. They are becoming ladybugs which are in our story “In Wibbly’s Garden”. The paper clay dough is going to take a while to dry as it is wet; when it is dry, we will take the circular shapes out of the moulds and decorate them. We thought that maybe if we put them into the oven they may dry quickly, but it didn’t really help.

Today was the first time that we did Show and Tell and Noah was the pioneer of this. He hid his Show and Tell underneath a black sheet and we tried to guess what it was. Then he took it out and we saw that it was a wooden treasure box. Our teachers asked him a lot of questions to help him talk about it. He said that he keeps small toys inside it; he keeps it in his room at home; he wrote his brother’s name on it and his mommy bought it for him. We are looking forward to seeing and listening to more of our friends Show and Tell next week.

Love Shelley, Darren and Kanako