The beginning of a short week

Today we welcomed Shelley back from sunny warm Australia. She seemed happy to be at school even though she arrived in Tokyo at 4.30am this morning. She said that there were lots of lights all around when the airplane landed and that it was dark. She told us that she visited her old school there and was happy to see her friends and family, while she was there; and go for a swim in the ocean at Bondi Beach. During the morning a few of us made pictures of our family members, after looking at our photos of our family. This enquiry will take a while as we have other side experiences that we are adding to our learning till the end of this term. Today we completed one of these experiences which started off with a discussion.

We sat with Shelley at the white boards and put our names on the one that said “I am here today”. Then she said that she is going to give us a clue as to what shape she was thinking about. She said: “It isn’t a circle and it isn’t a square; it isn’t a triangle and it isn’t a heart”. Then she started to hum a tune and most of us knew it straight away; it was “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”. We had a discussion about stars and where we see stars in life. We could only think of the stars that come out at night in the dark sky and we said that they are yellow in colour. Then Shelley started to create a shape on the one white board; it started off looking almost like a triangle but it had only two sides and we watched the shape grow and grow and then we guessed what it was; it was a tree. And we realized that there is always a really beautiful star on the top of the tree. This is where Shelley was leading us. So we sang “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” and then we looked at things that were transparent. We looked at Shelley’s glasses, Liezel’s glasses, we thought that maybe the window was transparent and the glasses in our kitchen corner. We learnt that transparent means something that you can see through. It does not have to be without a colour, like glasses or windows; it can also have a colour.

We have coloured plastic in our room that you can see through. In fact, if you look at our lights, they have transparent coloured plastic

wrapped around them. Well, back to the plastic transparent stars; we don’t want to say too much about them as they are sort of a surprise; but what we can say is that we filled them with an assortment of feathers, tinsel, sparkles, sparkly shapes and coloured sticks. Our teachers assembled them and added a jingling bell and a picture of our faces on each one. They glued the two stars together using sparkly glue inside a glue gun. They are really beautiful and we love looking at them hanging up in our classroom.

Earlier on in the morning we played a game using our faces with feelings on paddle pop sticks. We had wooden and plastic figurines as well and our task was to look at the faces of the figurines and compare them to the faces that we drew; and see which ones matched. We drew our own interpretation of certain feelings on our faces and we identified some of the figurines with these feelings. We completed the calendar for today and enjoyed spending the day indoors because of the cold rainy weather. We are so busy all of the time, our teachers are always giving us interesting things to do.

One of the things that Shelley brought back from Australia was a small Lego called Friends which we sat and built. We looked carefully at the booklet and tried to follow the plan. We made a few pieces and will make some more tomorrow.

Thanks for a great start to a short week in Petals Class. We look forward to seeing some of our friends again tomorrow and to make something special for Thanksgiving.

Love always the children in Petals Class.