"Animals on Safari"

It is already the seventh month of the year, July is here and we are now in our last week of summer school with the theme “Animals on Safari”. We started off the day with free play on the carpet and at the same time we had a large table filled with different kinds of animals and purple coloured play dough. We also had some knives and other utensils to use however the main purpose of this activity was to introduce us to “Animals on Safari”. We played with giraffes; lions; tigers; elephants; hippopotami; rhinoceroses; buck; zebras and crocodiles. While we were playing we were chatting about the different names of the animals and our teachers started working with us, one at a time to prepare the 3D animals that we are making. We had a selection of animal skins on paper, toilet rolls, cardboard strips, scissors, glue and pipe cleaners. Tomo and Beckett chose to make elephants. Beckett knew the different parts of the elephant and decided that he wanted to use a pipe cleaner for the trunk. The elephants head is a circle shape and we will make the ears from large pieces of card board too as elephants have really large ears. Beckett and Tomo spent time rolling the animal skin paper for the elephant onto a toilet roll and then they pasted strips onto hard cardboard which will be the four legs.Shoko chose to make a zebra and Clodia chose to make a lion. We went looked at all of the papers and recognised which animals they belong to. There was one with beautiful peacock feathers and another one that looked like snake skin. We will continue making these in stages with our teachers and then we will create a jungle scene with all of them.

The weather was a little strange today as it was raining when we arrived at school; then it stopped; then it became overcast again and just when we were leaving to go home at the end of the day, it became really hot and sunny. The park was really wet from all of the rain so we went for a walk in the neighbourhood and looked to see if we could see any animals. Whenever we cross the street, we look carefully to see if any cars are coming and then we raise our hands and sing “Hands up, hands up, hands up we’re crossing the street”. We were not only looking for “Animals on Safari” but any animals. We saw a real dog; dog statues inside shops; teddy bears; a monkey and a lion on clothes inside a children’s clothing store; birds flying in the sky and sitting on branches in trees; a whale and sea horse inside an incense shop and many other different pictures of animals in windows.

We sang “The elephant goes like this and that”; “Monkey, monkey sitting in a tree”; “Poor old Gerry Giraffe” and of course our “Hello” song. We also sang songs with actions. We forgot to tell you that when we arrived at school, Gento, who really love the music “The Four Seasons”, came and danced on the carpet in the classroom. He was wearing a turquoise coloured shirt today and Shelley found a fluffy scarf that matched his shirt. Shoko held one end of the fluffy scarf and Shelley held the other end and Gento and Tomo were jumping over it and then going under it. They had so much fun. We read a story called “How the birds got their colours”. It is an Aboriginal story from the Dreamtime. We also looked at books with animals in them.

It was a great start to our only week in July for a Fun Summer at Ohana.

With love from Shelley, Kana, Rachel, and Christine