Ears and hands

We heard a big roaring noise when we came into the classroom today and wondered what it was. Tokutaro and Eito went immediately to the table and saw a Tyrannosaurus Rex electronic game which was making all the noise. We soon discovered that there were lots of bones in the game just like the skeleton pictures on the light box yesterday. The idea was to choose a card and then look for the corresponding T-Rex bone. Using the attached tweezers we needed to be really careful and remove the bone from its place without touching any of the surrounding sides. If the tweezers touch the sides at all the T-Rex roars. We did really well taking turns with the game and had a lot of fun. Adam did a wonderful pencil self-portrait using a mirror on white paper. Riko dressed up like a doctor while Nile, Jennifer, Ava and Kosei used the new play-dough we made yesterday to make pizza and cakes.

After packing away we noticed how one of the Montessori puzzles had been put back but not all the pieces were in place. Together in our circle time we decided to all help by putting the pieces back one by one. We needed to make sure the pieces all went in the correct place by looking at the outline and then making sure that all the pieces were the correct height. We all did a good job with this! After having our snack we read a book titled ‘Ears’ which has lots of different sounds such as ‘tick-tock’, ‘tick-tock’ which we easily guessed was a clock and ‘drip, drop’ which we knew was water or the rain. When the teachers asked who had good listening ears we all said “I do” and so we played a listening game on the carpet. We all lay down on our backs and closed our eyes. The teachers put on a CD with lots of different sounds such as cows, phones ringing, a guitar playing etc and we had to listen carefully and if we knew the answer we could put our hands up. Some of them were quite hard like a person using a skipping rope but we guessed and got most of them right. We then looked at a strange black and white picture which the teachers told us was called an x-ray. On the x-ray we could see lots of bones inside our hands. We knew that not everyone’s hands are the same and so we stood up and compared our hands to those of our friends. Some of us had small hands and others had little hands and by putting our hands together we could see the differences. We then all moved to the table where we saw there was some play-dough, some white powder, a bowl of water and a cup. We then rolled the play dough flat and Arata and Eito pushed their hands into the play-dough really hard. When they lifted their hands up we could see a hand imprint in the play-dough. Together we poured some cold water into the bowl and sprinkled on the plaster powder. The teachers then told us we needed to use our hands to mix the plaster and it felt cold and slimy. Soon there were no lumps in it and we could pour it into the play-dough handprints. It soon began to set and when we touched it we were amazed it had started to get warm and had gone hard. We took the plaster out of the mold and were amazed to see our friend’s hands. We are excited to have try at this tomorrow morning too. In the afternoon Ayaka showed us how to say the parts of the face in Japanese on the whiteboard and we remembered words such as ‘me’, ‘hana’, ‘kuchi’, ‘mimi’ etc really well. Ayaka read us a great book called ‘Mayuge’ which is all about our eyebrows. Wishing you all a great afternoon,