Planting tulip bulbs

Today we had our second picnic under the cherry blossoms in Step Park. We were so happy that the sun was shining and the pom poms of cherry blossoms were full and beautiful.

  Upstairs, on the main table many of us came to make hats because we saw our friends wearing those that they had made yesterday. We decorated them with plastic stars as well as tape and jewels and Ava drew a princess on hers.

During story time, we read the book “The Story of Castles”. In this book, we saw pictures of people and the various occupations that they have in and around the castle. There was a carpenter who fixes and makes furniture, a blacksmith including a jester who is the king and queen’s entertainer. Our teachers asked us who else we think, lives and works in a castle. We know that there is usually a king, a queen, a prince, a princess and then we thought about some other people who could be an important part of the castle community.

 Beckett – page and soldiers

Elena – cook for the king and queen

Tokutaro – cook for the soldiers

Ava – doctor

Ryan – dentist

Clodia – fire fighter

Olivia – construction worker and a knight

Our teachers then introduced us to a new game called Chess. We looked at the many small pieces and tried to guess who or what they were. This game has knights, a castle, a king, a queen, pawns and some other characters that you move along a board. Today we were introduced to just the pawns. There are white pawns and black pawns. We had turns to place them in a row, first the black ones and then the white ones. Each piece moves in different directions and today we just used the pawns and moved them in the appropriate way. We couldn’t understand why they couldn’t move backwards and they could only go forwards. We will practice again tomorrow.

After rest time, we made some more flags and windows for the keep and tomorrow, the entire castle will be a toy for us to play with in our classroom. Yippee!

   Downstairs, we started making individual pictures of animals. Our teachers put out a selection of paper with animal skin designs on them. There was hair for a dog, bear or lion, black and white stripes for a zebra, orangy red and black stripes for a tiger, and leopard or cheetah patterns. We had circles in each design, rectangles and strips. We chose an animal and then tried to find the matching shapes for our animal pictures. We then used glue sticks to paste the shapes onto a page and will continue working on these tomorrow as we need to add things to them.

   We had pictures of animals to look at as a guide and our teachers let us paste the parts wherever we wanted to. As a result you can see that some of our pictures have their own individual look. We counted four legs, one head and one body.

Hisami made beautiful tulips with us using origami paper. We learnt how to fold a square into a triangle shape and we then attached a coloured paddle pop stick to the back of the tulip. Talking about tulips, we planted tulip bulbs all along our balcony today. We put in soil, rocks, fertilizer to give them extra nourishment and water. We smelled the back of fertilizer which was not very nice. Shelley said that she thought it smelled like it was the same smell as a farm. We know that the rain can also feed them as rain is water. We will also use a watering can to feed them and watch them grow. When we got up from rest time, Zachary looked at them and reported that they had already grown, which made every one feel excited.

  We are looking forward to our cherry blossom picnic on Friday and will be happy for the rain to come tomorrow and then bring the sunshine back on Friday morning.

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