3D "Animals on Safari"

Today was such a hot and humid day. When we came back from the park we were all so sweaty; our hair was wet and our teachers helped rub our heads and bodies with a towel. Our teachers were also thinking about our resting mats and how we all sweat a lot on them. They want us to have a sheet to lie on and then a light towel, in this weather. We will bring these when we start the new school year at the end of August. We had fun today with the animals and play dough and at the same time we continued making our 3D animals. Jennifer spent a long time making her giraffe with Kana while Gento and Tokutaro made tigers. They chose the tigers as they love the song “The monkey dance” which we played often during the year. We loved dancing to it and especially enjoyed roaring loudly like a tiger. They used the stripy tiger paper while Jennifer used the giraffe paper.

The bodies of all of our animals are made from a toilet roll. We rolled the specific animal paper around the toilet roll and then glued the same paper onto long or short legs depending on which animal we chose. Gento and Tokutaro’s tigers had short legs while Jennifer’s giraffe had long legs and of course a long neck. While this activity is quite teacher directed, we were involved in making the entire creation. Gento and Tokutaro counted and chose two eyes from the wiggly eye container; they counted four pieces of card board for the legs and put glue on the paper which they then pasted onto the card board; they chose a tiny pom pom for the mouth and took whichever colour they wanted to; they chose what kind of tail they wanted for their tigers; Gento chose a purple paddle pop stick while Tokutaro chose some pipe cleaners. He wanted them to be wrapped in the same tiger paper as the body and legs. They also squeezed newspaper into balls for the head; drew black lines on a piece of orange crinkle paper and then helped paste the different parts onto the body. When all of our friends have completed making their animals, we will make and “Animals on Safari” display.

When Jennifer made her giraffe she had to find a piece of card board that was quite long because it was going to be the giraffe’s long neck. The song about Gerry Giraffe explains that Gerry Giraffe is really shy even though he is so tall. The words go like this: “Poor old Gerry giraffe, is very, very shy, he hides behind the tallest trees, watching the world go by”. Our teachers say that just because you are big, doesn’t mean that you are more confident or more happy than others. It just means that physically you are big but not necessarily, emotionally. When we arrived at school we saw that Shelley was sitting on the mat with some of our friends. They were reading a book about a monkey. The monkey’s name is Curious George. He always wanted to see what other people or animals were doing and sometimes this got him into trouble. In this story he was taken from the jungle by a man in a yellow hat so that he could go and live in the zoo. Some people don’t like zoos as they think that animals should not be in cages and some people think that animals should not wear clothing either as their coats naturally keep them warm or cool. Well George had an adventure before he arrived at the zoo and he was really happy there. Shelley read the whole story to us and we paid attention really carefully. We listened and thought and pointed to many things. Wishing you a wonderful afternoon and evening; we trust that Mr. Rain will come another day and we can have another beautiful day with our friends and teachers

With love from Shelley, Kana, Rachel, and Christine