Welcome Momo chan

Welcome back everyone after a warmer weekend. Outside our school today, it has been so busy with huge cranes and trucks. We heard so much noise when we arrived at school as the builders next door were hammering wood together to make the interior of the house; however with the doors closed, we didn’t hear anything during the day. They put the house together just like a puzzle or construction game. Each piece fitted together on top of or next to one another. We liked the smell of the wood and are waiting patiently to see how the house will look when it is completed. Downstairs, we started off an art work which is in red and gold, for Chinese New Year. We used cotton buds with gold paint and made dots and patterns on the red paper. We pasted some of the red tissue paper which we had torn and crumpled up last week and we added some sparkly gold shapes as well. The sparkly things were in the shape of stars, circles, diamonds, squares, flowers, snowflakes etc. We will do this activity again tomorrow so that our other friends can have a turn to work on it. Each of us will get a part of this painting for our workbooks/portfolios. At the second activity table, we had individual sheets of paper and had a selection of drawing materials. We had wax crayons, markers, sparkly pens and coloured pencils. This activity also focused on the colours for Chinese New Year which are red and gold; so the drawing materials were all in red and gold. We also had a red stamp pad and thimble sponges. They fit on your finger and have a sponge at the end of them which you dab onto the stamp pad and then make patterns on your page.

  During the morning, we learnt about the forthcoming festival in Japan called Setsubun. Hisami read a story in Japanese called “Mame no Kazo’e n’uta”. It is a story about how beans grow and how they are prepared for Setsubun. When it is Setsubun, we eat dried, fried mame; we need to eat the same number of beans as our age. So if we are two, we eat two beans; if you we are twenty, we eat twenty beans etc. We will celebrate Setsubun on Monday 3^rd Febraury which is the official date for the festival. Hisami also showed us a mask of an “oni” which looks a little scary. We throw mame at the “oni” and say “oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi” which means “go away ‘oni’, bring goodness into our homes”. When we were getting ready to go to the park, we noticed that Shelley had a book on her table, and we thought that the picture on the front was an “oni”. In fact, she told us, the boy on the front was called “Momotaro” and he went to an island to fight the ‘oni’”. She then showed us pictures in the book of the ‘oni’ and Zachary, Marc and Adrien said that they were a little scary looking. When she asked us: “Why are you scared of the oni?” And Zachary said: “Because it will eat you”. Shelley said that she didn’t know that this is what the ‘oni’ did!

Upstairs we welcomed Momo to our class. She came to summer school last year and is with us for the rest of this term, before she goes to her new Japanese school. In circle time, our teachers asked us to look at our art work that we created last week, using the “Pop Art” style with dots. We were going to make a huge group art work using the same style. Well, when we looked at the size of the paper, we realised that if we were going to do dots everywhere, it would take us a long time. So we found a cylindrically shaped piece of wood which was quite long. How were we going to share it so that many of us could make dots at the same time? We could cut it! So we set to work and used the saw to cut a small piece each. While some of us were cutting the wood, the rest of us were cutting out the large piece of paper in different shapes. We then made dot printing on the large shapes which we used later in the day on our huge  art work.

This is the huge art work that we are making and the picture is of Koh who from the classroom downstairs. We think that it is a great photo of him. During library time, we read the book called “Not Dots” which was so funny. During free play time, Allie, Clodia, Jessica and Ava all played with the Montessori coloured tubs and used tweezers to sort buttons into the appropriate colour. Allie, Momo and Sophie helped join the large pieces of paper

    together for our huge group “Pop Art” project. Some of our friends worked on the easels using white board markers and Tokutaro and Sean worked on the graphics tablet. Tokutaro didn’t have a photo of himself so he and Noa both posed for theirs. It was a wonderfully creative day of learning and fun.

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