We love dressing up

It was another busy day with our friends at school today. We had some visitors who came to the school and enjoyed seeing us eating our snack downstairs and doing activities upstairs. Downstairs, we played in two different parks today. We first when to Step Park and had a fantastic time digging and making a river with Shelley and then we filled the river up with water. Each time we filled the river up with water, we noticed that the water disappeared. We were not sure why this was happening and our teachers didn’t tell us the answer. They always like us to keep wondering and thinking about the world and all the amazing things that are a part of life.

At one stage there were too many children in the park from other schools, so we packed up our things and walked to the nature reserve nearby. We were so happy to be able to look at the tiny fish in the water and the turtle. When we arrived, we kept really quiet so that the turtle wouldn’t know that we were there, but just as we peeped over the bushes, it dived into the water and sadly, we couldn’t see it. We had fun throwing little pebbles into the river and seeing the water go “splash”. There is one really big orange coloured fish in the pond as well as many tiny orange, silver and brownish coloured ones.

In our classroom, we did some colouring and some of us managed to cut out the shapes on the piece of paper. We will continue cutting tomorrow and also paste them in our portfolios. We will try to use the shapes to create an interesting design. We did some more threading with pipe cleaners and beads and puzzles. Our teachers continued to take note of our skills and work out how much we can count, whether we recognise our friends names on the flashcards etc.

Clodia brought a book from home for us to read but we were so busy we didn’t have a chance to read it. We will read it tomorrow if she doesn’t mind us keeping the book for another day.

Upstairs, we started making birthday cards for Yossi as he will celebrate his birthday during summer school. We will have his birthday then with all of the children who will be attending on that day. On the floor we had a carpet at the foot of the Velcro wall and the road map carpet at the foot of the Lego wall. Beckett enjoyed playing with cars and other vehicles on the road map carpet and when Sean arrived, he joined him. Beckett brought a book from home just like Clodia did, in her class. The book is called “Bill and Pete go down the Nile”. The Nile is the name of a river in Egypt. It is in fact, the longest river in Africa and the longest river in the world; and after we had read the book, we went to look at our large map to see if we could see Egypt and the river Nile.

We sang “Five little ducks” and at the one activity table Ayaka sat with us and showed us how to make five different kinds of birds from origami paper. We each had the opportunity to choose what kind of bird we wanted to make and what colour we wanted it to be. When we had finished folding the origami paper, we added in eyes by drawing them in with markers and then we took out the coloured feathers. We wanted to see if we could blow our origami birds into the air so it would look like there were flying however we needed to see whether we could do this if we attached feathers to the paper. This was so much fun and the feathers tickled our noses. So we kept one bird without feathers and then folded a second one, to which we attached feathers.

On the way to the park, we played our opposite game where our teachers say one thing and we say the opposite word. We also played “I spy” using the beginning sounds of words. We are so busy at the moment, consolidating what we have learnt during the year while still learning new things as we go along. We especially enjoy our literacy classes at the end of the day when we learn the initial sounds of words and play games with Darren and our friends.

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