Completing our castle

It was a busy day today and we were really lucky because only Ohana International School children were playing in the park today. It was as if we had our own private playground. The weather was a lot cooler than yesterday and we were glad that we could play outside today because it looks like it may be a rainy day tomorrow. Tomorrow is also a short day for us at school as we will close for our spring break at 11.30am.

Today downstairs, we completed our butterfly paintings and really enjoyed seeing how the pattern from one side of the page, was duplicated on the other side. We did some marbling and paint dripping using a huge piece of paper. It looks like a fabulous work of art and once again, it was recycled from some other work that we did recently. We held the edges of the paper and shrieked as the marble rolled towards us. Our task was to try to keep the marble on the paper. At another activity table, we did puzzles and the last activity that we had today was pinching pegs. Our teachers love giving us activities that helped strengthen our fine motor skills. They were even thinking about having pegs for towels for next years class. Then we will be pinching pegs from the very start of our year at school.

  We all really like to be independent at the moment and most of us do not want our teachers to help us eat our food, at both snack time and lunch time. We like to take care of all of our things and our teachers always encourage us to open zippers by ourselves, put our own shoes on, hang up our towels etc.

During circle time, Hisami read a book with letters of the alphabet in it. Next to each letter are pictures of objects that start with that letter. She told us what the sound of the letters is and she chose to do this, because many of us are showing an interest in the letters of the alphabet. One of our favourite story books at the moment is “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” and in this book we always see so many letters all over the pages.

In our second circle time, we held hands in a circle and sang good morning in different languages. Then Shelley asked us what we do with different parts of our bodies and we thought about the actions that we could do. When she asked us about our knees, Koh kun answered: “Heads and shoulders” because we touch our knees in this song; Zachary suggested clapping with our hands; Marc suggested jumping with our feet and the other actions that we thought of were: Winking with your eyes, nodding with your head, shrugging your shoulders, spinning round and round with your body, clicking with your fingers and wiggling your bottom.

  Upstairs we started to put together our styrofoam castle that we have been building together. Elena, Ethan and Ryan came to help when they arrived at school. They selected some toothpicks to help hold it together until the glue has dried. They pushed three toothpicks into the ends of the walls, then applied glue and pushed the pieces together. Then we moved the entire castle to the base that we have been making and we glued it onto the base. Beckett noticed that there were some gaps in the walls and he said: “Bad guys can get into the castle” so we decided to make some rocks out of styrofoam to fill in the gaps. We mixed glue with grey paint and the styrofoam pieces fitted perfectly. It was fun breaking the styrofoam into pieces as it looked like snow. Tomorrow we will hopefully finalise all of the detail on our castle, and attach the trees and other accessories.

 During circle time, Nanako read a book to us about how to construct a castle in Japan. We noticed that they make the top parts out of wood whereas in other countries in the west, they make them out of stone. In the book, it showed a picture of a man using a winch to lift up huge, heavy stones. We have a winch in our classroom, so we tried to use it. First Ethan, Sean and Ryan took one end of the winch while a few of us tried to pull Darren across the floor. Phew, it was quite hard to pull him. Then our teachers held the winch and Allie pulled and Darren started moving towards us. We changed positions and tried to pull one another. Beckett made an important statement after all of this. He said: “With a crane we can lift heavy things”.

 We have had a fantastic time learning about castles, improving our vocabulary and many other skills. We hope that we can continue for a while when we come back to school after the spring break.

Have a great afternoon and see you tomorrow for our last day of the term.

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