We are Artists!

Once again we had a busy morning downstairs trying to complete all of our activities that were planned for the week. Since many of our friends come to school on different days, we stretch all of our activities across the entire week so that everyone has an opportunity to do them. Today we completed our calligraphy for new year, our hagoita and our shimekazari. Our friend, Lanah has been sick this week so if she is well enough to come to school tomorrow, we will let her do the activities as well. We hope that she is feeling much better. We had a really interesting morning circle today. Our teachers are trying to encourage all of us to help pack toys away at the end of free play time, which is mostly working well. In order to help us get together on the mat, they start to sing the song “Let’s all hold hands in a circle” which we love. They are always amazed at how we never get bored with this song, and run to the carpet and hold hands with our friends each day. Today they asked us if we had any suggestions for actions that we could do. Koh suggested jumping and then all of us suggested jumping as well. Our teachers then asked us to think of different things. We shrugged our shoulders, wriggled our noses, clapped our hands, reached on tip toes with our arms raised in the air to touch the sky, touched the ground, moved our hips, clicked our fingers etc. Then when we were finally sitting on the mat, we did some more actions and said good morning to our friends in “English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, French, Hebrew, German, Tagalog, Danish and Spanish. Now this was the fun part, we sang our “Hello” song in really tiny voices. Our voices were whispering and we all sat attentively listening to the quiet singing. We all then said our names in a whisper. At the very end, Shelley asked us if we had used big or small voices and we said that the voices were really small and that we wanted to hear big voices; so then we said our names in big voices. Upstairs this morning the children were very excited to see a camera tripod on the table. When they asked what it was for we told them it is for them to use to create some ‘art’ photography. They were all very excited and Ava, Beckett, Jenny, Jessica, Tokutaro and Yossi immediately began snapping shots of their friends, the toys, the tops of their friends heads etc. We will all have the chance to take photos and these we will put in our special portfolio books. Also on the table was a special ‘Thank you’ card for Moko Sensei for the wonderful Taiko workshop last week. The front of the card looks like a Taiko drum and inside underneath each of the photos we all wrote our names with sparkly pens. On the carpet the giant Montessori puzzles were very popular and Jeremy, Jessica, Sean and Tirza all had a good time helping each other with the more difficult north America ones. On the small red table we saw a graphics tablet and computer for us to get used to drawing on a screen. We started off by trying the pencil, paintbrush, spray can and eraser icons and wrote our names and drew lots of pictures with our choice of colors. Next week we will use this to create a piece of ‘Pop art’ with our own face photos which we will trace around to make it look like a Lichtenstein print. It was a little difficult at first to get used to all the different shapes and colors we could use but great fun. Ava, Jessica, Beckett, Tirza and Jeremy all braved the cold on the balcony for a few minutes to check on their tulip bulbs and water them. Some of them have already started to grow and the tops look green and healthy. The park was a little warmer today and we were very lucky to see all our friends, brothers and sisters from downstairs. Jessica, Ava and Clodia all had races with Ayaka. We even tried racing sideways and while looking over our shoulders, backwards too! When we got back from the park together we finished the book ‘Katie and the Mona Lisa’. It ended with the Mona Lisa returning to her painting very happy as she had met lots of people while travelling into other paintings and got the chance to sing and dance too. Together we arranged the chairs in a semi-circle so that we could be real artists and Darren sat as a model in the middle. We got some white paper and a pencil and looked really carefully at Darren who was sitting with his legs crossed on a chair and reading a book. He had to sit very still and we all laughed when we went to show Darren our work but he was frozen still and couldn’t move because he was a model. We all together sang some of the songs from the ‘Jolly Phonics’ program and remembered the actions and most of the words. Another great day for all of us! Love Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine and Maryna