Amateur photographers

It was a rainy cold morning and we spent the day inside and did some fun games and activities downstairs. Finn arrived later than usual so we waited for him to do our morning circle and we started off playing on the mat and chatting to our teachers having quality time together. Renshi cut out pieces of the koinobori and he helped decorate Jou kun’s placemat for when he comes back to school on Thursday. He used stamps and markers and coloured pencils. Together with Shelley, he discovered that on the small stamps, you can make a print using both sides. On the one side there is a picture of an animal and on the other side on a rolling stamp, there are the footprints of the animal. It was fun to roll the footprints all over the placemat as if the animals were really walking on it. Renshi has started drawing triangles and so he made some small and big ones as well. Nico drew on the white board and eventually he filled the entire space with drawings that both he and Wendy did. We played with play dough again today and we had a similar set up as the one we had yesterday. There was a water hole and animals and trees around it. Renshi made a rock out of play dough and put it in the water hole. Shelley made a smaller rock and then they compared sizes. Nico made a really tiny one which is called a stone or a pebble. No one moved the animals but we made a snail and a few more creatures that we included in the animal scene. Maybe our teachers will do something different with them and see what we do next. They are using the animals and scene as a “provocation”. They want to see what we do with it; what we say about it; what we think about it; how we use it etc.

Another of our activities was called Scratch Art. It is almost like magical art. We all had a piece of hard paper in front of us and it was a shiny black colour. There were no markers, pencils, crayons, paints to draw with. There were just pieces of sticks. We were not sure what kind of picture we could make with sticks? Well, when we started to draw, there were so many colours coming from underneath the black. It was amazing! The more we scratched, the more colours came.  Shelley says that we will try doing this activity all by ourselves. We will make a colourful background and then colour over it with black pastel; and then we will draw and see what happens. We did another new activity today and that was taking photographs all by ourselves. We each took about nine photos which will be on the website blog instead of these photos on the journal. It was really fun as we wanted to take a picture of ourselves; so we stood really near to the camera and you can see our eyes, faces and bodies from close up. We also took photos of parts of things.

Yesterday two huge boxes arrived for us from America. They were filled with 1,000 paper cranes made by the children from the Oceanside Middle School in New York. There are so many and they are covering the windows of our school. We will put the finishing touches to our cherry blossoms and send them off to say thank you to them. We will also buy a Japanese “omiyage” for them. They make the room downstairs look rich and colourful. They are also in the office with a big sign saying that they come from America. We are lucky that people all around the world care about Japan and are doing things to help those who lost their houses when the gigantic wave came.

On the second floor we played with balls and sticks with long streamers on them and moved them to the music that was playing on the piano. We have a magical piano as it plays music and no one is sitting on it. Nico was curious about it, and he sat on the piano stool looking and the CD player trying to work out where the sound was coming from; especially since the CD was not going round!

Love Shelley and Darren