Animal masks on safari

Only one more day and then it is the end of the entire school year and we say goodbye to most of you for just a few months. Boohoo! We will miss all of our friends and teachers so much and we think that when we return to school at the end of August, many of our friends will have grown so much…….We don’t think that our teachers will have grown taller though! Today we made animal masks out of paper plates. We have been looking at books on animals this entire week and when we made our 3D animals we paid attention to the details on their bodies. Today we were once again given the opportunity to choose what animal we wanted to make and some of us chose the same animal for our masks as the 3D ones that we made. Gento and Tokutaro chose to make tigers; Shoko chose to make a pink panda; Clodia made a regular panda; Jennifer made an elephant; Lily made a monkey and Beckett made a lion. We went around the room once we had finished making our masks and we all tried to make the sound of the animal that our friends had made. We had one big problem though; we didn’t know what sound a panda makes. Kana suggested that we make a munching sound as if they were eating bamboo which is their favourite food.

We started off by drawing on our paper plates and then our teachers cut out two eyes for us so that we could look through the holes and see everyone looking at us. Then we spoke to our teachers about the different things that make each animal unique. Jennifer needed to make really large ears and a trunk for her elephant. She made a colourful trunk out of a pipe cleaner and two large floppy yellow ears. Gento and Tokutaro looked at a picture of a tiger and saw that it had stripes in black and browny orange. They drew with a marker on their plates and tried to make stripes and lines. Then they saw that a tiger needs two ears, two eyes, whiskers and a nose. They chose a pom pom for the nose and used both pipe cleaners and coloured matchsticks for the whiskers.

Beckett learnt the word mane today as this is the big bushy hair around the daddy lions head. He pasted brown tissue paper on his mask to make it look like a real lion. Lily made ears and spiky hair for her monkey and Clodia tore black and white tissue paper for her panda. Clodia and Shoko both completed their 3D animals. Clodia’s lion has a large yellow mane around his head and Shoko made a mane for her zebra by drawing on white tissue paper with black marker. She then rolled it up and twisted it

We read books in the library and one of the ones that we loved reading was about finding pictures in a large picture. This kind of book helps us with our visual figure ground perception. We were able to find many of the pictures and looked at the book again when we came back from the park. Kana played a game with us using the plastic animals. We each had a cup and she told a story about the animals playing outside under the trees and then they became tired and hot so they went inside their caves. They rested there until the morning and then they all went down to the water hole. This is really what most of the animals do in Africa.

We had a fun time with the cushions during free play and rearranged the area on the carpet as we have been this week. Shoko is the initiator of these games and we all join in and help her. Thanks for another fun day of “Animals on Safari”. See you tomorrow for the final curtain!

With love from Shelley, Kana, Christine and Rachel