Cleaning our garden

Thank goodness our teachers decided to listen to the weather report today! It is not always right but today it was and we went outside to the park early, as there was a possibility of rain; and this was a good decision. It did rain but later in the day when we had already been outside in the park. We spent some of the time cleaning the leaves that had fallen off the trees onto our garden. Some of the trees are still losing their leaves and usually they get absorbed into the soil or blown further away. Our teachers thought that it would be good for us to take care of our garden right from the start and cleaning the leaves up was an easy job to do. Of course we didn’t have to worry about watering the plants as the rain did this later too. We spent some time playing on the equipment as well and running around to keep warm. When we returned to school we took care of our own seeds that we planted last week. The ones in the park had already partly grown when we planted them however our seeds were like tiny little beans and we will have to be a lot more patient with them. We are not sure when they will start to grow. Upstairs we read a beautiful book called “Joseph had a little overcoat”. It is about a man who has an overcoat that gets broken so he makes a jacket which also gets broken so he makes a vest which also gets broken so he…………………….the moral of the story is that we should always try to use things and not waste them. In Japanese there is an expression called “motainai” and this story reflects this philosophy.

We used large white packaging to make snowflakes. The packaging is different from paper; it is soft and more floppy. We folded it just like we would fold origami and then cut some shapes out of the packaging. When you hold the snowflakes up they float down really gently, just like real ones.

Downstairs we sang our “Hello” song and our other favourite one which is “Open them, shut them”. We love singing and dancing to music too so we put on the Wiggles CD and sang and danced to “Shake your sillies out”; “Hot Potato”; “Where is Thumbkin”; “Walk”; “Come on let’s jump” and “Butterflies”.

We made candles using toilet rolls and pasted tissue paper all around them so that we covered the white. We will add to them tomorrow and of course we will need to make a flame so that they look like real candles. We love singing our song “Five little candles” and especially like it when we have to blow each one out. We usually sing this song when it is a birthday however because we are going to be learning about Chanukah, we have been singing it.

We started off our day playing on the mat with our friends and enjoying time relaxing together. When we see things on the activity tables, we immediately want to go there however our teachers like us to start off playing together on the mat and we go to the activity tables after snack time. We had so many things to do at the tables besides make candles; we also threaded shapes onto laces and we made drawings. When we draw our teachers are encouraging us to try to make shapes. We can make a circle and try to draw different sized ones on our papers. We are excited to be learning about Chanukah tomorrow and we will be making potato latkes for snack time….yummmmmm.

Love Darren, Sabine and Kanako