Our gardening day
Welcome back after a rainy weekend. It was good to be able to go outside and play in the park and those of us downstairs had a picnic snack in the park which was fun. Today was our Gardening Day and we spent time digging troughs for our beautiful flowers. When they 
were deep enough, we placed the gorgeous colourful flowers in the troughs, pushed soil back into the trough around them so that they keep firmly in place in the ground and then we watered them. The names of some of the flowers are cosmos, carnations, daisies and marigolds. They are in orange, yellow and white, pink, purple and many other beautiful colours. Last week we turned over the soil because we knew that the flowers were arriving this week so when we dug the troughs the soil was already loosened. We are so happy to have our garden in the park once again and will take care of them each day; tending to them and seeing that they get enough water.
Organising the garden took a long time so we had some extra time afterwards to play and enjoy being in the sunshine. We are also glad that we could help our friends and teachers and create a special place in the park for our Ohana garden.
Downstairs we started off our day drawing and having free play time. We sang our “Hello” song as well as the one where we ask ‘What are my eyes for’; after we had asked what all our facial features are for we asked what other parts of our bodies are for. We sing with sweet soft voices and know many of the words of the songs now. We are taking our theme about ourselves one step further and started talking about feelings and our senses. When we sang our other good morning song which we do using different languages, we always do actions. Today we did actions and thought about feelings. We made happy faces; sad, grumpy, scared, surprised, sleepy and wake up ones! We also looked at our tongues and were not so sure what they were for. Shelley said that we taste our food with our tongues and we realised that we use our tongues when we eat ice creams. We lick with them. Now when we sing our song we can include our tongues and sing “What are our tongues for”. We danced and sang to the Wiggles CD and did the “Monkey Dance”; “Hot Potato”; “Where is Thumbkin” and “Shake our sillies out”. We also did the “Butterfly” song and this time we placed beautiful butterflies on our fingers and made them fly and flutter all around the classroom.
Miya brought in a book upstairs which ties in with the mouth activity that we did last week as well as the planting today. The book was called “Plant a kiss”. It is about a little girl who plants a kiss and it grows to provide lots and lots of happiness. We hope that our garden does the same.
In our circle time, we drew a group face on the white board. Margo drew the shape of the face; Miya drew eyes; Jennifer drew the ears; Nico drew the eyebrows; Oliver drew the nose; Jamie drew the eyelashes and FJ drew the mouth. Afterwards we went to the activity table and made a face using a CD as a base. We used wiggly eyes, markers, tissue paper and other collage materials for this activity. We will hang them near the windows as the sunshine makes them look sparkly and reflects the light from them.
Ayaka introduced us to actions that we do with the remote control, in Japanese. Aruko – walk; swatte – sit; tatte – stand; nete – sleep; 
okite – wake up. When we came to the word “aruko” we all started to sing the song “Aruko, aruko watashi wa genki”. Oliver was really cute today because Ayaka knows that he likes the song “You are my sunshine” so she was singing it this morning. Oliver said to Ayaka when she was singing: “I don’t know that Japanese song”. Ayaka told him that it was an English song!
We are coming to the end of September this week and can’t believe that there are Christmas things for sale in some of the stores already. We don’t want the end of 2012 to come so quickly. Time is precious!
Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh and Christine.