Photos of our feelings

We hope you had a chance to see the new website and enjoy seeing the many things that are on display. We are happy to know that our special journals and photos of us are there for people to see. Today was such fun outside as it was warmish and we ran; played ball; slid down the slide; sat on the swings; played in the sand box and laughed with our friends and teachers. We started off our day reviewing the concepts “in front” and “behind”. Constant and James noticed that there was a tree behind Shelley, on the wall. They were right. It is our Friendship Tree which we are in the process of creating. We spoke about it yesterday but we wanted to talk about it again today so that Constant, Koyo, James and Ren could be a part of it. Today we spoke about some of the things our friends think are special to do for one another.

James: Make a card Quentin: Help one another Ren: Play with our friends James: Draw a picture

Koyo was holding hands with James and we thought this was something special to do. We also think that sharing is something special to do for your friends.

Wendy: Wait for your friends Shelley: Give a hug Darren: Take turns Finn: Eat with your friends

Tomorrow we will see who has a heart on the tree with their name on it. We will try to collect as many as we can during the week ahead. The other interesting thing that we did today was taking photos of our friends. We have been talking a lot about feelings and how we can show people how we are feeling on our faces. We don’t need to use words. We have a new tripod which is a stand with three legs on it and we took pictures of one another.

James and Ren have angry faces; Thorsten has a happy face and he was shy to look at the camera; Quentin is thinking in his photo. We even took photos of our teachers and told them how to make their faces. Darren had an angry face and so did Shelley and Wendy had a smiling face. We can see just by looking at our friends and teachers how they are feeling. Koyo and Constant were tired while Finn was surprised and Wendy was happy.

We will use the camera more often and the tripod is good as we don’t have to worry about keeping our hands still when we click the camera. Continuing from our discussion on kindness and what we can do that is special for our friends, we added some grass to our tree today. We used green tissue paper and tore it into strips and then pasted them onto the base of the tree.

During our morning circle as a lead up to talking about the Friendship Tree, Shelley mentioned to us that the large thick part of a tree is called a trunk; and that our bodies are sometimes referred to as our trunk. She then asked us if we knew which animal had a trunk. She took out the plastic animals and we looked at a few of them. We were a little confused because we thought that the animal’s body is also called a trunk, but this is not true. Animals are different from people. We looked at the giraffe, no trunk; lion, no trunk; koala, no trunk etc. And then we saw a lion and straight away James pointed to the long thing coming out of the elephant’s face. This is a trunk. Yoohoo!

Now we know that a tree has a trunk; an elephant has a trunk and a person has a trunk.

Koyo and Constant did the activity where you fold small pieces of paper and then glue only one side onto a page. Now we all have work on the wall downstairs on the second floor. We also have another new thing in the classroom and it is called a shredder. The shredder shreds paper and makes it into small thin pieces which we can use for many activities. We used coloured paper and had to wind the arm on the side of the shredder until the paper disappeared. The container is transparent so we could look inside while we were winding the warm and shredding the paper. The paper looks soft and fluffy inside now. We will take more of our recycled paper each day and shred it until we have enough to possible make our own paper. We also drew at the office table and on the white board. Our story today was an interactive story with us repeating what Shelley read in each line; just like an echo. It was called “We’re going on a bear hunt”. It was a fun and slightly scary story as the family went looking for a bear and when they saw it they raced back home and hid under the covers. In the meantime the bear was walking all alone on the beach!

Love Shelley and Darren