Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?

It was a busy day downstairs as we had ten children in our class. It is fun to have lots of friends to play with and our teachers try to prepare activities that both our younger friends and the older ones in the class can do.We looked carefully at the tree we made yesterday when we rolled the wire onto the huge tube and Allie, who wasn’t at school yesterday, recognized that it was a tree. We spoke about things that go on trees and Lily told us that you can have flowers while Allie told us leaves. We then set about getting a leaf from our teachers and thinking about what we can do for our friends that we can put on our tree which is called ‘The Friendship Tree’. Allie said we can play with our friends; Lily said that we can be happy and our friends will feel happy too; Tokutaro said that we can give a hug, Abiya said we can hold hands, Clodia said we can share and Olivia said we can read a book together. We will make more leaves with all of our friends in the class and today the five of us had our turn to do it. We will place the leaves on the tree and whenever we think of something in connection with the tree, we will add a leaf with our name on it. We read “Brown Bear, what do you see” and Abiya remembered the animals sequentially as she read the very same book at home. Some of us remembered which animals came next too and we joined in and read the story together saying: “Red bird, red bird, what do you see?” We had a great time doing exercises and singing and dancing with the musical instruments this morning. We also did a secretive activity with some of the children from upstairs. They came into our classroom and did an activity which we will tell you about another day…..shhhhhhh! Shelley had to go to Komaba Daigaku so she left just after lunch time when we were settling down to have a rest. It was a fun, busy and warm day and we had a great time playing outside in the park with no jackets and bare arms. Soon we will need to wear our sunhats and sunscreen which our teachers will remind you about soon. On the third floor today the children were excited to see a big container of water on the table with lots of toy fish, jellyfish, coral pieces, squid, starfish and octopus in it. Beckett was the first to play with it and was having a great time. Soon he noticed there were also paints on the table and remembered that some of us had a try at painting yesterday. Soon we all wanted to have a go and pulled the toy sea creatures out of the water to look at while we painted. It was a lot of fun and we had to be a little careful not to mix up the colors with the brushes. Miya had the great idea of painting her paper like the ocean, a bright blue firs. Then she had to wait for a while for the blue paint to dry as it would mix on the paper and make a mucky brown instead. Yossi and Noa took over the kitchen play area and set up the table with every piece of crockery we had and then had breakfast together. Beckett and Sofia meanwhile wanted to play in the corner and took along with them the house lego box and built a really nice house. F.J, Miya, Jenny, Sofia and Margo rummaged through the various boxes on the shelves trying to find lots of 'treasure' as they were playing pirates together. After we cleared away the toys Darren told us that today we would be doing things a little differently and going to have our snack in the park, like a picnic on the benches in the beautiful sunshine. We took our water bottles along with us so that we had plenty to drink. When we came back from the park we used the big container of water from the morning activity to make some special ocean like paper with Ayaka and Darren. We all watched and helped them drip some special inks on the water and mix it up a little. We chose to use green like the seaweed, and blue like the ocean for our artwork. We counted down from 5 and when we reached zero we dropped the paper onto the water's surface and the ink attached itself to the paper. When we lifted it up by the corners we were amazed to see the beautiful ocean like patterns and colors. In the library area we looked at a book titled 'Tiddler' about a little fish who enjoys making stories to tell his teachers and friends. We sang a new song too...'5 little Sharks'. Tomorrow we will start adding ocean creatures to our blue and green artwork from today which sounds exciting. Have a great afternoon and evening. Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.