Painting with our hands on bubble wrap

We had a fabulous start to our week downstairs with a guest, Junko, who is a friend of Nanako’s coming to school to do an activity with us. Junko comes from Australia and she brought along some bubble wrap for us to put our paint on. The great thing about this activity was that we didn’t need any instruments or implements, we just used our hands. We had red, yellow, blue and green paint and many of us had rainbow colours on our hands. We patted the bubble wrap and loved the feeling of the bubbles and the sound that it made when we were patting it. We thought that when we had finished patting it, the entire activity was complete but we had a surprise coming.

    In fact, we were all ready and dressed in our smocks and outdoor shoes, to go to the park when our teachers called us to the balcony area. The bubble wrap with paint on it, was lying there. Junko covered the bubble wrap with white paper so we couldn’t see it. Where was the bubble wrap? Some of us said that it was underneath the white paper. Then our teachers called a few of us at a time and we stomped all over the white paper. Sometimes we heard a popping sound, which was the sound of the bubbles popping as we stomped on them. Then when we had all finished stomping, she lifted the white paper up and the paint from the bubble wrap was now on the white paper. Wow, it looked fantastic. We want to say a huge thank you to Junko so teaching us and our teachers a wonderful way of using bubble wrap and paint. Junko works in a preschool in Sydney and has many wonderful ideas to share with us and our teachers. We also want to wish her congratulations because she is getting married this weekend in Japan.

      During the morning we continued tearing newspaper and placing it on the sticky parts on the large white sheet of paper. We decorated our ‘kabuto’ which are helmets that children usually make for “Kodomo no hi”. “Kodomo no hi” is boys day in Japan which is celebrated in May. We celebrated girls day in March and it was called “Hina Matsuri”. Please pop into the office because there is an amazing display of ‘kabuto’ and other impressive objects.

We sang our new “Good morning” song as well as our regular “Hello” song and “Let’s all hold hands in a circle”. We counted the number of  children and teachers in our class today during circle time. We watered our tulips on the balcony and noticed that one of them has a long shoot already. We are looking forward to seeing what will happen to the shoot. Will a flower grow on top of it? How tall will the shoot grow?

Today upstairs we noticed something new on the table with play dough equipment. It is called Plasticine. It is a lot harder than play dough and we have to use a lot more strength in our fingers to push, pinch, pull, roll etc. with it. The more we moved it in our fingers, the softer it became.

  Tokutaro made a snail and showed some of us how to roll a long sausage on the table and then roll the sausage so that it curls itself around and around, just like the shell of a snail. We had a selection of stencils with shapes of things from nature on them e. g. trees, flowers and animals.

We noticed some new flowers growing on a tree that we walked past when we went to the park. We counted the petals and were surprised to see four petals and a big thick green stamen. Ava found two new species of flowers blooming near the steps in the park. There was a red on and a yellow one. We took some photos and maybe will try to investigate what the flowers names are.

 When we came back to the classroom after park  time, we started tearing paper with our fingers and thumbs. We then took some old towels and started to tear them. We had to do this with a partner as it was a lot harder to tear the towels. One of us held a towel tightly and the other person, tore. You can see from our faces that we were using so much strength. We made many strips and after lunch we tried to tear the strips into squares and rectangles. We managed really well even though this activity was super duper difficult. Junko came upstairs to our classroom and read us a wonderful story called “Wombat Stew”. We learnt the names of many Australian animals that we had never heard of before e. g. platypus, echidna and emu.

Tonight is the start of “Passover” which is a Jewish festival that commences this evening. We would like to wish all our families and friends “Chag Sameach” and “Happy Passover”. We know that they will be feating tonight on matzah, matzah balls and more……yummmmm!

Thanks for a wonderful day everybody.

Shelley, Darren, Christine, Maryna, Sharee, Liezel, Ayakam, Hisami,

Goh and Nanako