Walking the plank

Today was another lovely sunny day but it was so windy it made us scream when we were outside playing in the park. The sand and leaves and things were blowing everywhere and the noise of things flapping in the wind was a little scary. Moko’s motorbike blew over and Liezel and Shelley had to pick it up otherwise we couldn’t walk along the path from the elevator. We always love seeing friends from both classes in the park and enjoy some time playing together with them.

Our morning circle downstairs involved a discussion about bees, flowers, pollen and nectar; which was basically a review of what we learnt recently. We are now trying to focus on seeds together with the concepts below and above. We saw that our seeds were pasted on the brown part of our paper with the brown representing the soil under the ground. Today we focused on the green and the seeds becoming flowers which grow above the ground. We made stems and flowers with pollen in them on the green part of our pages.

Abiya made a green and brown painting as she had not made one before and William also painted his. They painted half of the page brown and half of the page green.

 Our story was called “The Honeybee and the Robber”. It was a flap book and some of the pictures were 3D. When you pulled a piece of cardboard, something moved. It was fun to watch the pictures come alive! The story is about honeybees who live in a hive in the hollow of a tree. The make honey from nectar and pollen and they also see that the babies are fed. When they returned to the hive one day, the guard bee told them that there was someone trying to steal their honey. They heard a growling noise and there was a bear trying to steal their honey. The bees stung him and he ran away with lots of stings on his body. We learnt that when a bee stings, it dies. We curled up into little seeds under the ground and waited for the rain to water us and the sun to make us warm; and then we grew. Shelley sang these songs while we were curled up: “It’s raining, it’s pouring”; “I hear thunder”; “Good morning Mr. Sun” and then “I am a little flower”. We all grew into beautiful flowers and then held hands and danced around.

We sang good morning in many different languages and we did actions while holding hands in a circle e.g. jumping, clapping, clicking fingers, stamping, shrugging shoulders, turning around etc.

Upstairs Yossi went straight to the Lego when he arrived at school and he built a house and was really proud of it; Sean enjoyed doing the ABC puzzle and sang the song while doing it; Noa, FJ, Jamie and Jennifer got the marble run set out and put it together, watching the marbles race around and around, all the way to the bottom. Noa thought that it was funny how she could make the pieces look like a telephone and she picked one up and made a call to FJ.

In the library we read ‘Edward and the pirates”. It was a story about a boy called Edward who was learning to read. He had some interesting adventures with pirates and some scary ones too e. g. walking the plank. FJ wanted to know what “walking the plank” meant so we played a game with a plank made from red tape. We had to balance in between the red tape before the shark could get us.

 You can see from our faces that some of us where serious when “walking the plank” and others were not. Luckily most of us managed to get back to the beginning before the shark came.

In circle time, we drew lots of patterns on paper and will use these for our aquarium pictures which we are making at the moment. When we are finished making our patterns, we will turn the paper over and draw the outline of sea creatures. We will then cut them out and use them for our own individual aquarium pictures which will go into our workbooks/portfolios.

We hope that everyone will be able to join our Spring Picnic which our teachers moved to the Friday before. We don’t want to miss out on seeing the beautiful cherry blossoms and this year it looks like they will be earlier.

We hope that you enjoyed the sunshine today and that tomorrow will be warm without the wind.

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