How fast?

Dear Flower Class parents, We hope you all had a great weekend and enjoyed the winter sunshine. Today we welcomed back one of our friends from their winter vacation. He was very excited to be back at school and all his friends were very happy to see him again. On the table we saw the wooden bats (Hagoita) that we dyed last week and today there were just a few of us who needed to complete their coloring. To put the second and third colors on we poured some of the dye into a container and then dipped in our bats. This made some new colors such as orange, green and purple. On the second table we saw some special cards and many of us were able to write Happy Birthday on them without the teachers help. The birthday is a surprise so we cannot tell you who the cards are for unfortunately. On the carpet the train set and new library books were very popular with many of us. We remembered the rules about using and sharing the train engines and carriages. We knew we could have a maximum of 3 per person and needed to build the tracks first. Several of us tried the spinning tops on the floor too as this is a traditional New Year activity. Just before we finished packing away the toys Darren showed us some special hole-punches which we are going to use to decorate our hagoita bats tomorrow. The hole-punches have a part which can be changed to cut some different shapes. There were also lots of pictures of monkeys to stick on too once our hagoita are fully dry. After packing away the toys and eating our yummy snacks we went to the park. Drawing treasure maps on the ground was very popular today with lots of ‘X marks the spot’ areas on their maps. IN circle time we continued our discussion from last week on ‘How fast’ things move. We had already looked at people running, ostriches, cheetahs, falcons, propeller airplanes and jet airplanes. Today we continued with the speed of sound (660 mph), rockets, meteors and finally the fastest thing of all; light. We turned the lights off and when Pooja turned them on the light came on instantly. The book said light travelled at 186,000 miles per second and so we times that by 60 to give us one minute and then by 60 again to give us the speed in miles per hour. It worked out to be a very, very big number; 669,600, 000 miles per hour. Wow!

Have a great afternoon and we look forward to seeing you all again tomorrow.

All our love, Darren, Pooja and Ryoan.