A Cabbage and A caterpillar and lots to eat

Today the rain poured down for the entire day that we were at school. We were lucky that we could keep our classroom door open so that we could have fresh air and listen to the rain dripping down onto the ground. We heard the pitter patter of the rain and the woosh woosh when the cars drove by on the wet street. In our classroom, we also had water but it wasn’t rain. We had our water trough from the balcony, filled with water and sea creatures. Yesterday afternoon, some of us who stayed at school for an after school class or after school care had fun playing with the fish in water, inside the container for the cars. Today our teachers decided that we would continue this play, as we loved it so much however this time, the water was in the trough so that more children could play at the same time. Even though we wore smocks, some of our clothes became wet. Our teachers changed us into our spare clothes and hung our clothes up to dry. We had a great time moving the water around, splashing of course and discussing the different creatures that were swimming. Our teachers took this idea further and we started making sea creatures using the shredded paper from the other day, a plastic bag and some recycled art materials.

These are some of the fish that we made. We pasted on eyes and fins after we had filled the bags up with shredded paper. We will make some more sea creatures tomorrow and our teachers are hoping that one of us would like to make a jelly fish. For the jelly fish their plan is to use the same materials as well as a paper plate and ribbons.

At the other activity tables we did some challenging puzzles and are learning how to try to match the colours and shapes. The one puzzle has a whole lot of different coloured dogs on it and we looked for the different colours and parts of the body, which were our guide. Liam and Miyu chan are two of our friends who worked on the puzzles today and were successful. We also had a Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse puzzle which of course, we love looking at and trying to do.

We are trying to consolidate everything that we learnt during the past year and are focusing on our friendships in the class. We sat with our friends and teachers and when they asked us the question, “How do we show people that we love them?” we answered all by ourselves: “We can hug them” said Zachary; “We can kiss them” said Tomas. Then we all went to the carpet with a partner. We held both hands and we sang a song “Let’s be friends”. We danced around together holding hands too. At the very end of the song, we gave each other a hug. Then we listened for our names and went to wash our hands in preparation for snack time. Our snack time song was probably heard all the way in Roppongi today, because we sang so loudly with big voices.

We spent some time in the MPR, playing in the ball pool, running around, trying to climb on the climbing wall, and building with the Lego. We also love to climb up the little slide and slide down. When we went back to our classroom, we saw that the cushions and chairs were all arranged differently. At the back was a row of 10 chairs and in front of the chairs were our circular shaped cushions.

On each chair was a picture of something that the very hungry caterpillar ate. We could choose what picture we wanted to put around our necks and we sat down on a chair or cushion with all of our friends. Then Shelley placed a rectangular shaped red cushion in front of her and started to tell the story.

It went like this “In the light of the moon, on a little green leaf…….” And she took out a leaf with an egg on it……then the sun came up on Sunday morning and “pop” out came a tiny but very hungry caterpillar. We all said: “I am hungry” and off went the caterpillar looking for food. He walked all around the room to all of us and we went through the story and the days of the week consecutively.

We all tried to say what food the caterpillar ate and name the one that we were wearing. Hisami then took her cabbage and the family of caterpillars and we sang the Cabbage song in Japanese. Then Shelley took a mum, dad, brother, baby, horse, pig, sheep, shark, monkey, dog, cat, sheep and cow and we sang our “I want you to meet my family”. We had a turn to come and find one of the members of this very big, interesting family and put them in their container for packing away. We sang our “Hello” song and then went to stand on the feet that are on the floor near the kitchen. We stand on the feet and wait for our turn to go and wash our hands.

It was a wonderful fun day at school today and we look forward to seeing some of our friends who were not here today, tomorrow.

Love always Shelley, Hisami, Liezel, Nanako, Ayaka and Goh.