Welcome Riku

We welcomed our new friend Riku to our class downstairs this morning. He really liked playing with the cars and was happy to look at them all and line ton them up on the carpet. He liked holding his fork and chopsticks at lunch and snack time but he didn’t want to eat anything. We look forward to seeing him again at school on Friday.

We started off our day with some of us making animals using the paper with animal prints on them. Lilian completed her zebra and Nina made a bird. Lilian looked carefully at a picture of a zebra and she realised what missing on her picture. She chose two eyes, two ears, one long tail and a mouth. Nina chose two eyes, wings, a beak and two legs for her bird.

  We took responsibility in a big way this morning, with one of our activities. We each opened up our Workbooks/Porfolios and pasted some of our work in them. Usually our teachers do this but today we took charge and did it together with them. They will do the write up and when our parents come for the conferences in May, they will be able to see some of our work.

We had more newspaper tearing at another table and the last thing that we did was matching. We divided the class into two groups with one group doing matching and the other group listening to a story with some Japanese words. In the matching game, we all looked at the cards and named the pictures on them. There was a large selection of objects and things that we know e. g. car, girl, balloon, helicopter, After snacktime, we all went to the carpet and held hands in a circle. We did actions and laughed when we put our elbows on our knees etc. We sang a brand new song about many countries and how people say hello. We loved the part where it repeated how we say hello in Japanese which we all know is “konnichiwa”.

It went like this:

“If I lived over in Paris, France

The place where the can can is the dance

To welcome you I’d day ‘bonjour’

But in Japan we say ‘konnichiwa” x 2

If I lived over in London town

The place where the king and queen sit down

To welcome you I’d say ‘helooooo”

But in Japan we say ‘konnichiwa’ x 2

 We sang about Germany, Korea, South Africa, Australia, America and the Philippines.

   Upstairs, on the main table, Tokutaro and Ryan wanted to use the white boards, markers and magnetic letters to make their names. They copied the letters from their flashcards. They then copied all of the letters that they had onto their white boards. Of course, when we see our friends doing something different, many of us become motivated to join them in their activities. Olivia built a fantastic castle out of coloured wooden blocks. Blue attempted to complete the Montessori wooden tree puzzle and after much perseverance, he did it. Well done Blue! It was a pretty difficult puzzle.

During our time at the park, we decided to look carefully at the different flowers growing there and compare them with one another. We looked at both their differences and similarities. We looked at chrysanthemums, orchids, cherry blossoms, daisies, tulips and dandelions. There were some that we didn’t know the name of! We noticed that some had five or six petals and some had more than forty. We observed the shape and size of the leaves and how close they grew to the ground etc. We even saw some honey bees collecting pollen. We also learnt a lot of new vocabulary e. g. petals, stems, leaves, bulbs, stamens etc.

When we returned to school, we started working on our large group project. We had one long piece of blue paper which represented the sky and we each took some green cardboard and made the grass. We found that if we held our scissors correctly, using our pointer finger as a guide and placing it out of the rings, we could cut quite easily. When the cuts were complete, we used our hands to make the grass “swishy swashy” like the grass in “We’re going on a bear hunt”. We glued the paper on and then tried to cut out some leaves. We put these in our drawer and will use them on our art work tomorrow.

 Thanks for another wonderful day at school. We hope that Karl is getting better as we have missed him being at school the whole week. Love always, Darren, Shelley, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine, Maryna and Sharee