How much do we weigh?

We were so excited to see some black paint and special rollers on the table today along with a big piece of wood. The paint rollers had diagonal lines, spots and what looked like tire tracks on them. First we put the roller I the black paint and rolled it on a sponge.  We then started to roll the paint onto the wood and saw how it looked like road tracks or tire marks. Eventually we painted the whole piece of wood black and Darren told us it would be used to mount our plaster cast hands we made last week onto. Adam and Marc had a great time with the wooden blocks which have holes and tracks built into them for marbles. They worked together really well and took turns trying out their creations using the marbles. On the small table Riko, Goh San and Eito enjoyed playing with the memory game and took turns to see if they could remember where the pictures were under the caps.  Tokutaro and Ava decided to use the K-Nex construction kit to make helicopters each which they strung around their bodies and made long pieces for the helicopter blades. On the main table Ayaka helped the children with their measuring activity using tape, scissors and a ruler each. They chose four colors of tape and cut varying lengths to stick on their paper. Taking a ruler each they measured the tape and wrote next to each one how many centimeters they measured. In circle time we had a small discussion about what happens to our bodies after we get an ouchy. Tokutaro told us all about how he hurt himself and how it is feeling better now and soon it will be all better as his body is fixing itself.  We decided to do some body exercises to see what we could do with our bodies and tried stretching up to the sky, rolling our heads, rotating our arms, touching our toes and even linking our arms behind our backs. We then tried a little yoga and when we looked at the ‘table pose’ card it showed a table with a vase of flowers on it and so we decided to put something on our tummies to try this. We didn’t have a vase of flowers and so we used a saucepan. It was not very heavy so we could all do the table pose for a count of 10. We wanted to know how heavy the pan was but couldn’t use our rulers or the tape measure. We then found the weighing scales and decided to see how heavy it was. It weighed 200 grams and soon realized that if we compared it to something else, a piece of wood in this case it was very difficult to tell which was heavier. We made a balance scale of our own and put a small cell phone on one end and a toy car and a tape measure on the other. They balanced!  Next we wanted to see if we could balance and with our friends we tried standing on either end of a piece of wood with a centerpiece in the middle to help. We were then amazed to see that if we moved the centerpiece we could lift Darren by pushing down on the other end. Wow!! Adam then lay down on a big piece of paper and we all took turns drawing around him. We could measure parts of Adams body such as his waist, legs, arms and head all from the drawing. We will do more measuring tomorrow and decorate the outline. Lastly we tried pulling Darren along but he was too heavy and we learned a new word ‘Kilograms’. We then got a block and tackle out and used that to pull him across the floor. It was great fun and will try lifting things more tomorrow. All our Love, Darren, Ayaka and Goh San