Cool Construction

We were so happy to hear that our friend Ashling was coming to school this morning and she will be with us right to the end of Summer School. She knew exactly what to do when she arrived at school and she has learnt all the routines really quickly. When Darren showed her how to cut the tape for her box construction activity, she understood straight away and did it all by herself. We all started the new week off playing on the mat with different kinds of blocks. Our theme for this week is “Cool Construction” and we are going to be making all sorts of things using different materials. We used coloured wooden blocks; Kapla blocks; small wooden blocks and the Kinex building game. We worked and played co-operatively with one another and shared our toys readily. This is always important for us as sharing is one of the toughest things that we need to learn to do as we are growing up. Phew! When we had finished our free play on the mat, we packed away and stood in a circle holding hands. We sang “When you’re happy and you know it”; “Open them shut them”; “There are seven days in a week”; “Sunday Monday” and “Let’s tap our hands together”. We enjoy singing and the last song that we sang was our “Hello” song. We like to sing this   song and sing our part and then use our hands to show the next person that it is their turn to sing. We had some new friends at school today which was such fun. Thomas, who used to work with Shelley when she first came to Japan, came to visit and he is so gentle and kind. We loved having him with us as he helped us with the activity and he played with us in the park. Wendy and Keiko were in our classroom as well so we had so many loving and caring adults with us today. Keiko and Thomas learnt the words of our “Hello” song really easily.

Jamie was with us again today and he always likes to help us pack away. He played with blocks that were inside a small wagon and built towers. Darren taught him that the long round one are called cylinders or columns. They are really good for making towers and other tall structures. Balancing smaller blocks on top of them can be a problem as they can fall over quite easily if they are thin. At the activity tables, we had one activity with our squiggly pairs of scissors. We had scraps of colours paper and we cut them and pasted the pieces onto another piece of paper. We used glue sticks which are fun to twist. At the second activity table, this was where we started our “Cool Construction” theme. We had a selection of boxes which we know are burnable; and plastic items which are non-burnable. We learnt this through learning about how to separate the things that we need to throw away after lunch and snack. We had tape and glue and pairs of scissors and we could make whatever we wanted to. Today Jamie made a boat; Sui made a fish; Ashling made two horses; Finn made a boat and Nico made a fish. We used large and small boxes, toilet rolls, yoghurt containers; candy trays; and markers. We drew eyes and other things with the markers and also did some colouring. We had coloured foam shapes too which we pasted on to our creations.

We looked at books in the library and then we went outside to the park. This was such fun as we climbed on the really challenging piece of equipment; and now so many of us are really confident when climbing on it; we played in the sandbox with our new sand toys; we went on the slide and we ran around kicking and chasing balls. We have some new balls in our park bag too. We have one small soft rugby ball, a bowling ball with holes to put a few fingers in, a small white ball that is rough when you touch it, a tennis ball, our regular blue ball and another ball that has a spring in the middle of it. When you push it down it bounces up again but you need to use a lot of strength to push it down.

What a fun busy day at Summer School! See you tomorrow with Maddie and Shoko

Love Shelley and Darren