Animals around the world

It felt like a real wintry day with the sky grey and the air cool and we were fortunate enough to be able to go and play outside in the park. Upstairs we started off sorting through animals that were on the table. We grouped the animals according to those that live in water; those that live on the land etc. and we placed them all on the play mat that has grass, trees, water and bushes on it. We placed the giraffe near a tree on the land; the hippos in the water, kangaroos on the grass too with the monkeys, lions and elephants. Some of us spent time building a tower with the Kapla blocks trying our best to balance them so that they didn’t fall down.

   In the library we read “The Jungle Pop-up Book” which showed us which animals live in the jungle. We are learning that animals live in different places. Some of them live in the jungle; some live in the ocean; some live in grasslands; some live in hot places and some live in cold places. Some animals don’t like the cold weather at all so they hide themselves away for the entire winter and then emerge when the weather gets warmer. This is called hibernating. We looked at the world map with different kinds of environments e.g. grasslands, deserts, icy arctic, swamplands etc. and saw where different animals live.

In our circle time we sang “You are my sunshine” and then played an animal game. We each chose an animal from the box and Darren gave us clues about an animal e.g. this animal has black and white stripes. It likes to eat grass and is a fast runner. In the beginning some of us thought that it was a panda but when he said that it runs fast, we couldn’t imagine a big panda running fast. We knew then that it was a zebra because a zebra comes from the horse family and they are good runners. We all had turns to give our friends clues and see if they could guess what animals we were talking about.

At the activity table, we joined four large pieces of construction paper together. We chose from a variety of green collage materials and made a jungle scene. We used scissors, tape, markers, felt, masking tape, vinyl tape, green paper etc. We pasted all of these materials onto the paper and this will be the background of our jungle scene.

Downstairs, we spent time sorting through insects and fruit in different colours. We named the different fruits and placed them in the containers that were the same colour. The grapes were purple so they went into the purple container; the blue berries were blue so they went into the blue container; the oranges and bananas went into the orange and yellow respectively and the strawberries and apples went into the red and green respectively. We also counted them and there were six of each. We brought the sea creatures to the table as well and even though they are not really one colour, we played with them together with the insects. We are observing our caterpillar closely each day and some of us have been carrying it around in the container. Sometimes it lands upside down on the carpet and our teachers are trying to explain to us that it would be good if we cared for it a little differently. Some worms don’t mind being upside down though and if he does land upside down, we think that he will turn himself the right way around.

 Clodia and Olivia did their hearts for Tokutaro’s birthday which is in 10 days time; most of us had already completed ours yesterday. Well our teachers asked us if we wanted to put sparkles on the hearts and of course we said “YES”! They squeezed the sparkly paint out of the bottles and we “smoodged” the paint on the hearts. Tokutaro also participated as he loves sparkles. We had green, red, gold, silver, blue, pink and yellow sparkly paint. Now the hearts look really sparkly.

Thanks for a fun day at Ohana.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh and Christine.