We are all the same and we are different

It was a beautiful sunny day today and we were happy to welcome back some of our friends who had been ill. We were also sorry to hear that some of our friends are still sick. We hope that everyone will get better soon and come back to school so that we can all be together again. With the warm beautiful sunny day, we had a great time outside; watering our plants, pushing friends sitting in the wagons, climbing, sliding, digging, running, laughing and having fun. In the sun it was warm however in the shade it was a little coo.

Upstairs Margo, Noa, Beckett and Yossi all completed their sweet potato paintings. They printed with sweet potatoes and purple paint.  We have now completed some amazing farm drawings and paintings as you can see here. We included the fence in our drawings and paintings as well as animals that we particularly like. We have been observing animals really carefully through pictures in books and looking at 3D plastic animals. Before we start working we have a discussion with our friends and teachers and today we made a list of things that we observed e.g. fences, farmhouse, vegetables, cows, horses etc. Each of us had a piece of paper that we green at the bottom and blue at the top to work on. The green represented the grass and the blue represented the sky. We used markers, crayons and pencils to draw with. The pictures that we did today were similar to the paintings that we made yesterday.

In the library we read “How the birds got their colours”. We looked at the book title and then thought about many different kinds of birds e.g. ducks, owls, pigeons, eagles, parrots etc.  We then sang our Soong “Over in the Barnyard”.

Downstairs, we are following through with our theme on “Change and difference” and today we had a painting activity at the table. First we looked at the colours in the saucers and tried to match the colours with our smocks. We had red, green, yellow and blue and Ava and Olivia had green smocks on, Tokutaro and Vincent had blue smocks on and Claudia had a red smock on. No one had a yellow one on today. We painted a page trying to keep the colours separate from one another. Then Shelley took another piece of paper and we mixed colours and we used many pieces of paper as we just wanted to mix and mix and mix. We discovered that red and yellow make orange; red and blue make purple; yellow and blue make green; yellow and green make light green and so on. We spent a long time doing this activity and didn’t have time to do the other one which we will do tomorrow.

During our circle time, we stood next to a friend and had to think about the differences in one another. We noticed that Ava was tall and Tokutaro was short. Tokutaro had long hair and Ava’s hair was shorter. Vincent was smaller than Clodia and Shelley was taller than Olivia. She and Ava both have blue eyes and Nanako and Tokutaro both have black hair. Some things are the same and some things are different.

 We spoke about leaves and how they change colour and sang “Five little leaves”. We all held a leaf and when it was our turn to let our leaf go, we blew really hard and let it float down to the carpet. We sang our “Hello” song; our “Wake up it’s a lovely day” song and we sang good morning in a few different languages. Our concentration span is getting longer and longer and we are showing an interest in so many new things.

While we were in the park, our teachers helped us collect some leaves so that we can do a leaf rubbing activity and they also want us to sit and look at the differences in leaves; the shape, the colour, the design of the veins etc. We will look at them tomorrow and do some more art work with them.

Thanks for a wonderful day today.

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