Happy birthday Pauline

It was so busy today in both classrooms at our school as we started preparing for the art auction which is part of the wine tasting fund raising event for the Philippines and Tohoku. We are doing some different artistic techniques and look forward to watching our works in progress evolve into real masterpieces! Upstairs we started doing some marbling on our canvasses and they came out looking amazing. These are just the background for our art works and we have no idea what technique we will do next so it is all “wait and see” for all of us. Each day a few of us will work on our canvasses so that we do not rush through them. One month may seem a long time however many artists we learnt, take years to complete their sculptures or canvasses.

Today Adrien and Tomas joined us upstairs and they loved playing with the pink blocks that make a tower as well as the trinomial cube. They were really fascinated by many things because coming upstairs is a novelty for them.

  To make the backgrounds for our canvasses today, we had to do a lot of preparation. Beckett helped fill a large trough with cold water; and it had to be nearly filled to the top. He then selected three colours which he put into the water with a dropper. He needed two or three drops of each colour. Then he took a chopstick and moved the colours around the surface of the water which made amazing patterns. Together with his teachers, he held the canvas on the surface of the water and ………some beautiful patterns came onto the canvas.

     We also made marbling pictures using paper and the interesting thing was that, when we put the paper on the surface of the water, it floated on top however when we put the canvas on the surface of the water, it started to sink. We realised that the canvasses are heavier than the paper so this is why they sank. When the weather is warmer, we will do some experiments using water and different objects and see which ones sink and which ones float. On another of the activity tables, we all worked on our Valentine’s Day cards for our families. We pasted a photo of ourselves in the cards and decorated them on the outside and inside. We used paper shapes and markers. At the park we used skipping ropes and cone shaped markers as well as tennis balls. Our teachers observed some of us making new friendships which they felt was beautiful to see.

During circle time, we spoke about the countries that our parents and some of us come from. We looked at our giant map and then looked at the many flags that we have displayed on the wall. Ava identified Canada straight away, remembering the flag from yesterday’s International Month experience. We looked at the shapes on the flags and noticed that some are similar and some are different. We did notice that many flags have white and red in them. We are not sure why.

  Downstairs, we celebrated Pauline’s birthday with her mum, Britt, and her grandparents, “mormor” and “morfar” who are on holiday from Denmark. We started off the celebration receiving a Danish flag which we waved and did actions with. Our teachers are really good at adapting songs to capture the moment and today the flag was added to the actions that we did. We raised the flag in the air; we put it on the ground; we tapped our heads with it; we put it on our tummies etc. We then held hands and sang “If you’re happy and you know it” and “Happy Birthday to you” in English and Japanese. Britt and her mum sang “Happy birthday” in Danish too. We added in “Pauline is two years old today” and then Hisami went and switched off the lights and there was one candle burning. The reason why there was only one candle burning was because the candle was in the shape of the number two. Pauline’s “morfar” took lots of photos of the party and while he was taking photos, we listed to a wonderful story called “Monkey Puzzle” which is one of Pauline’s favourite stories. We then went to have snack time and had delicious fruit skewers with little Danish flags on them. We ate so much fruit and were really happy. Our teachers believe that whatever we are given to eat, we will eat. Today we had no cupcakes to lick so we ate juicy, yummy fruit sticks. One of the fruits on some of the skewers had a teeny bit of dark chocolate but most of them were just plain. Oh, we forgot to tell you that Pauline’s mum brought her beautiful life book today and she went through the photos with us. We saw so many members of her family in Denmark and then we saw pictures of animals; because Pauline loves animals…..and so do we! We want to say a big thank you to Britt, Pauline’s “mormor” and “morfar” for coming to celebrate with us and for their generosity in so many ways.

Today many of us took home little bags of cookies which we made for our parents for Valentine’s Day. Our teachers hope that we will share them with our families rather than eat them all by ourselves. We want to wish all of our friends who are not at school tomorrow a “Happy Valentine’s Day”. We love you all and hope that you have more fun when the snow starts falling tomorrow afternoon.

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