A fun fabulous day at school

Today is the last day of April for this year and we didn’t mind the rain, because, number 1 it fed our tulips that are growing and number 2, we had so many activities to do today, we were kept busy all the time. We continued working with our teachers, individually in order for them to observe many of our skills. We did puzzles, counting, number symbol recognition, name recognition and we looked at the letters of the alphabet to see if we knew the names of some of them. We usually focus on the sounds of the letters of the alphabet as this is will help us when we learn to read in English.

We learnt a song about our family quite a long time ago but since our theme for the next month focuses on Mothers Day and family, we are singing it a lot lately. Today Shelley had a bag filled with things and we didn’t know what she was going to take out. We started singing the song and then as we came to the next line, we realised that there was a selection of family members inside the bag as well as animals. Sometimes animals are part of our family too. Each member of the family has a different tone of voice; daddy’s is deep, mummy’s is a bit higher and the baby has a very high pitched voice. When the different animals came along, we tried to think what tone or pitch they would have. We thought that the cow definitely had a deep tone while the cat had a high pitched tone. Each of us had a turn to take one of the family members and tell our friends, how we thought they would say “My family”.

We played musical instruments and sang and danced to our Wiggles CD. We listened to our favourite songs which are “The monkey dance”; “Walk”; “Shake my sillies out”; “Hot Potato”; “Butterfly”; “Where is thumbkin”; “Swaying” and a new one which we tried to sing “Willaby Wallaby”. In the “Willaby Wallaby” song, you sing a persons name with a “w’ in front of it. So Hisami becomes Wisami; Vincent becomes Wincent; Miyu becomes Wiyu etc. We had to try to guess whose name we were singing and Lilian knew them all. She had fantastic listening ears today and she worked out the sounds of everyone’s name.

At the activity tables, later in the morning, we pasted origami shapes onto a large group art work. We used glue sticks for this and filled with paper up with circles, triangles and rectangles in different colours. We played with play dough and flubber at the other table and alternated with our friends so that we could all have a turn to do everything, if we wanted to. During library time, we read in small circles and listened to many stories that we had requested that our teachers read to us.

Upstairs, we made some beautiful flower pictures using red, green and yellow giant ink pads. We used red and yellow for the tulip flowers and green for the leaves. During circle time, we looked at the seed pods that we had collected a long time ago in the park. They had changed over the many months that they have been in our classroom. We noticed that they were now dry and crispy and as soon as we picked them up, tiny little seeds started to fall out. We couldn’t see the seeds initially as they were so small so we took turns to look through our new magnifying glasses, to see what they really looked like. They were still quite small even when we used the magnifying glasses. Then Tokutaro had a great idea. He said: “How about we use a telescope?” Ava knew exactly what he meant and said: “You mean microscope!” So we took the microscope and saw that we still had some sea urchin eggs on the slide. When we looked through the microscope magnified a lot, there were tiny little eggs on it. When we looked away we could not even see them.

We went to the MPR room today and set up some tape on the floor so we could try and balance like an acrobat. We used our arms to help us balance as the tape was really narrow.

We looked at our cherry blossom art work and noticed that there was something missing from it. We thought of nests and birds and eggs since in spring time, the weather becomes warmer and birds come out into the warm sunshine. We took our nests and eggs which we made last week and found a place on the trees to put them. Our teachers used the glue gun to attach them to the large art work. The art work is high up on the wall so Darren had to pick us up so that we could reach and place the nests where we wanted them to go. Ayaka then introduced us to some Japanese spring flower songs. She first reviewed the colours in Japanese to see if we remembered the words. The three songs were the tulip song, “Haru ga kita” and “Cho cho” which means butterfly. We made origami tulips and sang the tulip song while we were making them.

It was a full and fabulous day at school today. We hope all of our friends stayed dry on their way home. See you tomorrow. Shhhhhh! Don’t tell anyone……tomorrow we are celebrating Darren and Maryna’s birthdays as they are in May.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Christine, Maryna, Goh, Nanako, Sharee, Liezel,

Ayaka and Hisami