Happy birthday Lucinda and Welcome Mika

Yesterday we welcomed Michaela and today we welcomed Mika to our class downstairs. Today our classroom had its full quota of children and it was a full fun day. We want to say a hearty welcome to our new friends Michaela and Mika and hope that they have lots of hours of fun and learning in our class. We are so happy to have some new friends to play with. Today we all had our photos taken for the year book and our friends who were not here today can have theirs taken together with the class photo, in April. Kerry and Junko had some fun toys for us to play with while we were waiting and some silly ones to help make us smile and laugh when they took our photos. They showed us our photos on a large screen when they had completed taking them. We couldn’t believe that our faces were on a TV screen.

  Some of us who have brothers or sisters at Ohana, had photos taken with them which was fun. During the morning, we pasted white doily hearts onto our large Valentine art work. We also played with “Flubber” which Liezel made yesterday afternoon when she was looking after a little girl. It has an interesting texture and at first touch, it is cool. When you play with it, it stays cool and has a ‘flubbery’ texture. It was a lovely blue colour and we used the same utensils and equipment that we use for play dough and spent a long time playing with our teachers and friends. Our teachers felt that it kept our imagination longer than when we use play dough. Maybe it is because it is a novelty and the texture is new to us. The next big event of the day was Lucinda’s birthday party. She is going to be three on Saturday but she will be in the snow then and we don’t have school on Saturdays. So we celebrated today with her mum and a fabulous array of mostly healthy snacks. The snacks were designed to look like one of our favourite stories viz. “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. Denise, Lucinda’s mum, made the cupcakes look like a caterpillar (we will show you all the photos); then she made another caterpillar out of round  fairy bread sandwiches, some vegemite ones and the head was made from a tomato with rosemary for the antennae and cheese and herbs for the eyes..

 On another platter there was an array of fruits, which the caterpillar ate each day and on the last platter was some of the food that he ate on Saturday, when he got a terrible tummy ache. Denise read us the story of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” which we listened to attentively. Lucinda was dressed in a caterpillar costume which Denise had made for Alexander when he was younger. It had spikes on the bag, antennae and eight legs.  We want to say a big thank you to Lucinda and her mum and dad, for preparing this wonderful snack for the birthday party today. We had so much snack that we shared with our friends in the classroom upstairs and they were really happy. They mostly got some fruit from us.

  Upstairs, we are almost done with our group art work and have one more thing to do, and that is to put our thoughts in the thought bubbles. Today we finished all of the paint work by putting yellow paint on the Koh kuns clothes. Koh kun is the one in the picture. The black stars actually can still be seen through the yellow paint. Sophie helped glue the thought bubbles onto the painting. Tomorrow our teachers will write down what we think he could be thinking or what we would like him to be thinking. Jessica, Ava, Allie and Noa set up the board game, Snakes and Ladders and had a great time playing together. They all know how to wait their turn and helped one another count the dots on the dice.

  During circle time, we looked at the Children’s World Atlas. It teaches us about where the earth is in Space, the continents, environment (deserts, flowers, vegetation, mountains etc). We took the huge Montessori puzzles to the tables and looked at the various continents that make up the world. They are Australasia, Europe, South America, North America, Africa, Asia and Antartica. We looked at the world map and the different continents and matched them with the puzzles. Then we looked at the different countries on the map and tried to find which continent they were in. Our teachers asked us if we knew what we call a place that is not attached to land and is completely surrounded by water. We were not sure so our teachers took some interesting equipment to show us. You can see in one of our photographs here what we did. Jennifer poured coloured water into one of them and then said: “It’s an island!” and she was correct. Ethan poured some blue liquid into one of the trays too. When we looked at the map once again, we noticed that some places in the world are not attached to land but are completely surrounded by water and they must be called islands. Some of us saw that Australia is an enormous island as it is completely surrounded by water. Japan is made up of many small islands. Ayaka showed us a big long stick which is the “oni’s” club which they apparently used when they were being chased away at Setsubun. It is made of gluten, flour, brown sugar and honey. Some of us quite liked the taste of it.

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