Warm sunshine and fun in the sun

It looks like “spring has sprung” and the warmer sunny days are here to stay. Together with the warm sunshine this morning, we welcomed Sean back to school after his operation and were so glad to see him. He was really excited together with Jamie as it was their first day in our new building. We were also so happy to see Grandma Jackie and Grandpa Kevan who both look so well and ‘genki’ even though they only arrived from England on Saturday. We are so looking forward to them coming to be our teachers in Beckett’s class on Wednesday and Clodia’s class on Thursday.

Upstairs we had a good conversation about our new school and what is different and what we like. We then took photos of us with the things that we like the most in our classroom. Miya liked the Velcro wall; Sean likes having a drawer for his own work; Nico likes going through the holes in the room divider; Beckett likes sitting at the Listening Centre with the headphones on; Jamie likes the Lego wall; Emily likes writing on the white boards; Sofia likes the magnetic white board; FJ likes the new library area and Noa likes the birthday pictures up on the picture rail. We will put these up in the classroom so that everyone can see what the changes in our class mean to us. When Sean and Jamie arrived at school, we were so happy as we have missed them. They also seemed to love the new classroom and moved to the different play areas, looking inside the boxes to see what toys there were to play with. Sean watched Nico cautiously as he crawled through the holes in the dividing wall. It looks like he would love to do this himself but maybe he needs to get used to things a little more before being adventurous in this way. At the activity table, we made sea creatures on a collage. We chose from starfish, dolphins, fish, puffer fish, sea snails, and sea horses. We decorated them with patterns and then cut them out. We will mount them on paper to make a group ocean collage. Downstairs, we had a fun interactive story which Shelley told us from her memory. It was about a seed that grew into an enormous pumpkin. The pumpkin was so enormous that no one could pull it out of the ground. So she pretended that she was the farmer and she pulled and she pulled and she pulled but the pumpkin would not come out of the ground. So she called her friends and the first one was Lily; together they pulled and they pulled and they pulled and still the pumpkin would not budge. So Lily called Olivia and Olivia held Lily, Lily held Farmer Shelley and she held the pumpkin and they pulled and they pulled and they pulled. This went on for a long time and Clodia held Olivia, Tokutaro held Clodia, Vincent held Tokutaro, Allie held Vincent and Zachary held Allie and eventually the “pretend” pumpkin came out of the ground and they all feasted on delicious pumpkin treats. They had pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup; pumpkin pudding and many other varieties of food made with pumpkins.

We also read a story from a book in our library called “The Surprise Garden” and saw lots of different seeds in it. We used some seeds that looked similar to the ones in the story for an activity that we did later in the day.

We are trying to remember all the rituals that we do when we arrive at school as well as the one new one which is, to find our names and place them on the right side of the magnet board near the front door of our classroom. Some of us try to reach up high however we can also place them low down. When we returned from the park, we did a structured activity at the table. We had some tissue paper in soft pastel pink, orange and white; we had little seeds and we had origami paper cut into the shape of cherry blossom petals. We saw many petals lying on the ground in the park when we went for our cherry blossom picnic on Friday. The base for our activity was a piece of soft laminate folded over. We felt the soft laminate and it was so sticky so we didn’t need glue for this activity. We sprinkled the real seeds with the help of our teachers and then added petals as well as some scrunched up tissue paper. Now when we look at our pictures hanging up, we can see right through them as the soft laminate is transparent.

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