Our U.K. Visit

We had another great day today and tried some new art making techniques with colored paint in the morning. Later this month we are going to be looking at extreme weather including tornadoes.  We used a salad spinner with some circular paper today to create a fast spinning effect with the paint. We put the paper inside the salad spinner first and then spooned some paint onto the paper surface. We then put the top on the salad spinner and turned the handle as fast as we could to make the paint fly outwards to the edges of the paper. When we opened the top we saw the wonderful ‘spun’ artwork patterns left on the paper. On the small table we saw the Lego motorcycle gift that Aiden kindly received yesterday ready to be put together. Aiden had been waiting for his friends in Flowers Class to arrive to help him put it all together. They put the loose pieces into some trays to make it easier to select the right pieces and managed to put the frame and part of the engine together today.  Several of us enjoyed the airplane cockpit play today and flew away with our friends to other countries. After packing away the toys we did a small circle time with Pauline and discussed how we could be nice to our friends and what kind of words we could use if we were unhappy. Soon it was time to visit another country as part of our International month.  Today we visited the United Kingdom and Darren told us we would be having our special guest from England. We needed to use gentle indoor voices and slow movements or he would get scared. Soon we saw ‘Dash’ the Border collie all the way from England come to visit us. Border Collie’s are quite common in the U.K and used on farms as working dogs. We got to feed dash some snacks and pet him too. Dash then did some tricks like sitting, offering his paw, waiting, lying down, jumping to catch a ball and rolling over. We then saw how he would chase some snacks through Yuko’s legs in a figure 8 pattern. Dash then went off to Petals and Buds Class to say hi to them too. In the classroom we saw the U.K flag and how it is made up of the flags of Scotland, Ireland and England.  We saw a photo of Queen Elizabeth and recognized her from the pictures on the U.K money. We also saw some other famous places and features of the U.K such as Big Ben, Thomas the Tank Engine books, Peter Rabbit books and fish and chips too.  We then headed for the park with Dash and enjoyed throwing the ball and watching Dash chase the ball and bring it back too. We asked lots of questions about having a dog including: “What do dogs eat”? “Do dogs get dessert”? “Does Dash like Vanilla Ice cream”? “Can Dash understand Japanese as well as English”? “What games does Dash like to play”? and ‘Will dash get bigger”? It was a good time today and we had lots of fun. Tomorrow we will fill in our passports with the countries we have visited recently and then later this week finish up with a visit to India. Have a great afternoon and we look forward to seeing you all again tomorrow.

All our love, Darren, Pooja, Pauline & Ryoan