Happy Birthday Marc and get better soon

We are getting proficient at using the tablet that Darren brought for us to use for our art project. Ava, Beckett and Ryan used it to work on their “Pop Art” portraits this morning. They were able to crop the photo, choose a background, colour and change the colour of their hair, clothes etc. When we have all completed our portraits, we will copy the photos of ourselves, four times and make them into “Pop Art” portraits. Clodia used the camera all by herself and took some photos of the children in the classroom. She took five photos of her friends playing and working which will be posted here on the journal page and on the website.  Noa, Sean and Clodia came to the table to do their watercolour painting. They knew how to mix water with the paint; not too much and not too little; and they created interesting art works.

 Some of our friends built a tower using the pink Montessori blocks. There is a certain way of placing them on top of one another which we have learnt to do. Our teachers are happy when we want to experiment with the blocks and be creative outside of the Montessori guide book.

In the park, we had races and played “What’s the time Mr. Wolf”. Our story time today involved looking at the a book on Van Gogh called “My Portfolio”. In this book were many paintings of his “Still life” works. We learnt that a “Still life” painting is a painting of something from real life that is not movable. The things that people paint in “Still life” paintings are usually food, flowers and other things from nature or things that have been made e. g. furniture, glass, books etc. We selected some fruit and vegetables and used oil pastels to create our own “Still life” art works. When we look around our room we can see many things that can be included in a “Still life” painting. We could draw Lego, puzzles, our drink bottles etc. We are really enjoying looking at different genres of art and trying to create our impression of these in our own art works.

Downstairs, we made a large group painting using gold and silver paint. We painted the white paper with paint that also had glue inside. The glue helped us paste our gold and silver patty pans on the paint and they adhered to the paint really well. When we had painted all over the white paper, our teachers helped squeeze gold and silver sparkly paint on top of everything. This huge painting will be cut up into small pieces so that we can each have a piece for our workbooks. When we are doing Chinese New Year, next week, we will be doing art work with red and gold so we will be doing more art work using gold.

 We had many more activities to do during the day with some even just before lunch. The second activity that we did when we arrived at school was stamping using animal stamps and ink pads. We know the names of many of the animals and are learning how to use the stamps. Some of us turned the stamps around and couldn’t understand why we didn’t see the animal prints on the paper. We realised together with the help of our teachers and then turned them the right way round. Before we go to the park, we have so many things to do and one of them is to put on our jackets. This morning Shelley took all of our jackets and popped them in the middle of our carpet and then she sang: “Let’s hold hands round the mountain” because she thought that the pile of jackets looked similar to a mountain. We did some actions around the jacket mountain and then we sat down on the carpet and sang our “hello” song. When we had finished all of our singing we placed our shoes on the edge of the carpet, one pair at a time and we put our jackets, hats and smocks on. This all takes quite a long time. The last thing that we need to do, is to put our outdoor shoes on. You can see the logistically, it makes “getting ready for the park” take quite a long time.

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