3D Dinosaurs
Hisami shared with us that the 3rd February is called Setsubun in Japan. On this day we throw beans outside our homes to stop bad things from coming in, and keep good luck inside our homes. There is also the tradition of throwing beans at an “oni” which represents bad things or evil. People put on “oni” masks and pretend to be bad so that children can throw beans at them. We looked at many different “oni” masks and saw that they all have horns on top of their heads. We will make our own masks to pretend that we are “oni”. When people throw beans they say “oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi” which means out with bad luck, good luck is inside. We hope that we will see an “oni” next week when we all celebrate Setsubun here in Tokyo. It sounds like fun. People also throw beans and eat them – they count them so that they are the same number of beans as their age e. g. since many of us are three years old, we will eat
three beans etc.
We had a lot of fun with Liezel singing and moving our bodies to the book “Head to Toe” which Shreyas gave us when it was his birthday. We laughed a lot when we were doing the movements and remembered many of the words. We changed our calendar and if you get a chance to come into our classroom, you will also see that we changed our classroom around; just a little. We moved our dress up corner into another corner, we turned the carpet around in our library and we added another piece of furniture into our room. The new piece of furniture is from the office and it has become our display area in our “museum”. We have just started putting up a display about dinosaurs. Today we started making 3D dinosaurs out of junk art. Some of us sat together with Shelley and Hisami and we chatted about the different kinds of dinosaurs on the table.
We found a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Brachiosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Ankylosaurus and a Pterodactyl. We tried to find as many dinosaurs as we could, that matched the ones on the table. Then we chose one of them that we wanted to make; and this was the big challenge. We looked inside a large box of junk art to find things that we wanted to use to make our dinosaurs. Today, two of our friends made their dinosaurs; Griffin made a Tyrannosaurus Rex and Sofie made a Brachiosaurus. They looked at the detail on their dinosaurs and had a fantastic time making theirs. You can see how serious they were, choosing materials, attaching them with tape, covering them with paper etc.
When they were finished we placed them onto our new “museum shelf”. Our teachers asked us if we touch
things in a museum and most of the time, we told them, we don’t. So we are trying to see if our “museum shelf” can be a “look and do not touch” shelf. Our dinosaurs are made of paper and boxes and straws and things that are mostly easy to break, so we think that it is a great idea to have this kind of shelf in our classroom.
We played a memory game with cups and pom poms. Hisami showed us three pom poms and three cups. She hid the pom poms inside the cups. Our task was to try to remember which colour cup had which colour pom pom inside; and what made it more difficult was that she moved the cups around to trick us.
Shelley read a story about “How the camel got its hump”. We didn’t know that camels store fat in their humps which feeds them when they are in the dessert; and it lasts a long time. In this story there was a genie and we remembered that there was a genie in the story of Aladdin.
Thanks for another fun day in Petals Class.
Love always the children in Petals Class.