Chess and Bones

We all had a fun day inside today due to the rain which poured and poured. The children as soon as they came in asked “No park today”? Realizing that we don’t go to the park on rainy days unfortunately, they then asked “Are we going downstairs to play”? After the last few days of nice weather it was a shame we couldn’t go to the park. Tokutaro and Olivia headed straight for the chess set on the table and were excited to play with the new pieces. We now have pawns, rooks and bishops to play with. In the afternoon yesterday the children were excited to see how the bishop can move diagonally both forwards and backwards. Tokutaro did a great job teaching Olivia how the pawns can move. On the main table Ethan and Ryan brought their junk art dinosaurs they started yesterday and added spikes and tails using recycled marker caps and card for the tails. We had to use some different white glue to stick these on properly. Arata, Allie, Jeremy, Jessica and Olivia used the cork boards with wooden shapes and nails to make pictures of their own. Jeremy made a great dinosaur and Allie made a house. It was a real test of eye to hand coordination placing the nails through the blocks and then trying to nail them to the corkboards. On the main carpet Olivia and Beckett were very excited to see the large train set and all the trains out. We looked carefully at the bottoms of the trains and saw that some of them will take batteries to make them move. Luckily we use rechargeable batteries in the school and found a few spare ones and watched as the trains sped along the tracks. In circle time we read the book titled ‘Harry and the bucket full of dinosaurs’ which is about a boy Harry who discovers lots of toy dinosaurs in a box in the attic and then takes them everywhere with him. He even takes them in the bath and to bed with him. When we looked at the dinosaurs in the book we saw that we also had some of the same dinosaurs in the classroom toy boxes. We found a small one called Ankylosaurus which had what Ava described as a “Club” on the end of its tail. Beckett suggested that if another dinosaur came to try and eat it, then the Ankylosaurus could use its tail to hit the attacking dinosaur, or scare it and make it run away. In the front of one of our dinosaur books we saw a picture of a man with some dinosaur bones and read that the bones had turned to stone. We then passed around a real piece of dinosaur bone. It felt cold like a stone and was all textured on the outside. It was also very heavy for its size and was very, very old (140 million years). We saw our own dinosaur pictures we made using the overhead projector last week and thought they needed to have somewhere to eat, and run etc so we headed for the table and mounted our cutouts onto a piece of construction paper of our choice. Using some green paper strips we then made some grass using the same snipping technique with the scissors to make grass below the dinosaur’s feet. Some of us even made trees so that the herbivores could eat the top most leaves. We will continue these pictures over the next few days so they can go in our special ‘portfolio art books’. Soon afterwards we headed for the multi-purpose room to have some fun exercise with our friends. We put all the balls out and the climbing wall was again popular with the children. In the afternoon Ayaka lead the children with songs in both Japanese and English. They are practicing hard for their end of year party presentation and really enjoy the singing experience. All our Love, Darren, Ayaka & Rashmi