Learning fun concepts

Today we were back at school as per usual after our fantastic Hanami picnic on Friday. We were really sorry that some of our friends missed the wonderful day out in the sunshine with our friends and family.

We have some wonderful photos which we will all be able to see later in the week when Darren sends them via Snapfish. Today started off upstairs with lots of leaf and plant puzzles which heralded the start of our Spring theme. The puzzles area of different kinds of plants with one showing a tree trunk, branches and roots; another one with a flower and its stem, stamen etc. The third puzzle had a leaf on it and we recognised the veins from when we looked at leaves earlier on in the year.

    We now have our large styrofoam castle on the mat in our classroom and we love playing with it and remembering all the new vocabulary that we learnt when we were doing our castle theme. Jessica, Marc and Beckett used the plastic figurines and finger puppets along with some small animals inside the castle.

Today we went to Amishiro Koen to get the soil ready for our Garden in the Park. Tomorrow we will be getting a whole lot of new plants and flowers to put in our garden there. We are trying to get the people at the ward office to let us use some of the space at Step Park as we go there regularly and can tend to the garden a lot more if it was there. They said that they would think about it.

We used metal shovels to dig in the soil and soften it so that we can plant the flowers easily tomorrow. We removed plenty of weeds and twigs from the area and we hope that it will stay dry overnight so that the soil stays soft for us tomorrow. On the way back we saw lots of different spring flowers and plants and we knew many of their names including pansies, ivy, tulips and roses. In the library we read “How does it grow – from seed to sunflower”. While we were reading the book, we had a look at some different kinds of seeds including sunflower seeds, tomato seeds as well as the bulbs that we used when we planted our tulips. We looked at the roots of the bulbs which we can see since we planted one of them inside water in our transparent container for growing things. We looked at our tulips which we planted in troughs on the balcony and saw that many of them are really tall. One of them had already opened and was a beautiful purple colour.

Downstairs, we learnt some new concepts this morning and one of them was ‘next to’. Shelley started off by asking us, who she was sitting next to. With the help of our other teachers we looked at her and saw that someone was sitting on either side of her…..this is what ‘next to’ means. So we went all around our entire circle, looking at our friends and trying to work out who was sitting ‘next to’ them. When we sit in a circle, all of us will have someone sitting next to us on both sides of our bodies. However, when we sit in a line, the two people at the end of the line will only have one person sitting next to them.

 When we returned from the park, we sat together on the mat and joined our pieces of snake together. We pasted paper that looks like snakeskin onto small rectangles last term and we put them all together and now we have a long snake on the board in our classrom. We had a turn to place each rectangle, next to one another until we had used up all of them. Koh chan told us that the snake needed eyes so he can attach them on Wednesday when he comes to school.

We did fun games using our voices and bodies to explain a few more concepts. We did high and low; when we did high we raised our arms into the air and said high in a high voice; then we brought our arms down and in a deep voice, we said low. We used words like up and down too. We started off saying the words and doing the actions slowly and then we went faster and faster which we loved. We clapped our hands in a similar way and tapped the tips of our fingers too.

At the activity tables, some of us did our origami tulips with Hisami; some of us completed our animal pictures with Shelley and we also played with our lovely play dough that we really love touching. We also like the smell as it is made from hair conditioner. Some of us did some drawing and some of us did some cutting. At the workshop which our teachers did on Friday afternoon, they learnt that you keep your pointer finger out of the scissors as this finger guides the scissors and the hand when cutting things out. For some of them, it is tricky as they always put their pointer finger inside one of the holes. From now on they will be encouraging us to try to use a pair of scissors in this way. The lady who taught them about this is called “The Scissor Fairy” and her real name is Teri Suzanne.  She also stressed how important it is for us to be doing things with our hands and bodies as this is so important for our all round development.

We read “The Surprise Garden” this morning and once again saw the different shaped seeds that grow into vegetables and fruit. We are patiently watching our bulbs on the balcony to see when they will start sprouting.

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