A horse in the making

So we think that there is a possibility of our journals getting longer on some days so that we can fit everything into them. We sometimes like to have lots of photos as they really show us “in action” at school each day and this takes more space on the page.

Friday is our KIDFIT exercise programme and we continued learning about our hearts and how important it is to move our bodies. When we do this, the blood gets pumped to our heart and also from our heart to our other organs. All of our organs work well if we get enough sleep, eat healthy food and exercise. Our teachers never have to worry about us doing exercise because we all love to move our bodies and run around. This helps our brains too which are the computers of our bodies. They send messages to our legs so that we walk when we go to the park; they tell us to close our eyes so that we can sleep; they make our mouths smile when we are happy etc.

In our class today, Tony demonstrated what we had to do for our obstacle course. We had a hopscotch mat which we jumped on, alternating one and two feet, we had a foam balance beam that we walked on, we had a mat that we rolled on, red shapes that we jumped on and a tunnel that we crawled through. We did actions to a “hokey pokeylike” song and we went around pumping the air with our arms and marching with our legs.

 During circle time on the mat, Shelley asked us to guess what animal she was. She gave us a number of clues e. g. I have four legs, two at the front and two at the back, I have a head, two eyes, a mouth, teeth and a tongue, I have a mane and a tail. She said that she likes to eat hay and sometimes sugar cubes and maybe carrots. Her final clue which helped us guess what animal she was, was the noise she made with her mouth and straight away, we knew that she was a “horse”. Since it is the year of the horse, we are going to make a horse out of a box and other junk art materials. We are going to use the box for the horses body, a long tube for its neck and we attached two tissue boxes together and

these will be his legs. We started covering the tissue boxes with black paper which we tore and then pasted on with glue and we painted the entire box and the long tube with black paint. We are looking forward to watching the transition that the junk art materials will make, to become a horse.

Upstairs we created our own individual pictures using stencils, markers, coloured pencils, sparkly pens etc. Ethan, Ryan, Sean, Allie and Jeremy took charge of the camera and took photos of whatever they wanted to. Some of the photos in the journal here, are ones that they took. Sean took one of Beckett who was moving past him and he has a huge smile on his face with his hair blowing behind him. We had turns using the graphic tablet which is similar to a computer except you can draw on it. We used the paint programme which gave us the freedom to use a pencil, paintbrush, spray can, rectangle, circle and oval. We could choose whatever colours we wanted to use and we will work on creating our own portraits next week.

Some of us did beading at the one activity table and to add to our amazingly creative day, we took chalk to the park and drew in the green area on the concrete wall. Our teachers explained to us that that the chalk will fade and if it rains, it will wash off; that’s why we should only use chalk to draw outside on walls. Graffiti is another form of art which people do on walls and some of it is really interesting. We are not sure if we will learn about graffiti.

During cirlce time, we started off by reading “Harold and the purple Crayon” which we had previously read. This time around, we noticed that Harold drew rain to help the flowers grow. We looked at our bulbs and flowers growing and wondered if we drew rain, would we be able to sprinkle it on our flowers to help them grow! Hmmmmmm! Maybe it really needs to rain and we of course know, that we can water our flowers ourselves. Our teachers took photos of us with our “koma”, “shuji” and our “tako”. These are our New Year photos which we will put into our workbooks/portfolios. We all tried to spin the “koma” with the string and found it quite challenging. We also had our KIDFIT programme today whichi focused on our hearts.

We wish everyone a wonderful weekend and see you next week.

Love Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine and Maryna