Autumn Colours

It was a shame we had rainy weather today as we were so looking forward to going to the park. We made the most of it in the classroom however. In the morning on the table we saw some colored paper circles which were green, yellow and orange. Alongside the circles there some wavy edged scissors for us to use. We were going to make Autumn colored leaves and needed to use the scissors to firstly cut around the edges of the circles to make them wavy. We then folded the circles in half to make a vein down the center. Once we had folded the center vein we folded the leaves concertina style to make the smaller veins radiating from the centers of each leaf. Once we had folded them we could open them out and saw some beautiful leaves. Several of us finished our magic remote controls today and did the writing for each of the buttons above each one. Also on the table was a special paper clay birthday cake which we are making for Shelley’s birthday party on Friday morning. We made the main cake on Monday and so today wanted to put some colour and decoration on it. We mixed up some pink paint and used some small sequin sparkly shapes to decorate it. We hope she likes it. Tokutaro and Ayaka had a game of chess using only the pawns to practice their moves. In library time we looked at a book titled ‘The Seasons’ which showed us all about what happens in the Autumn and how it gets cooler, the farmers bring in their harvest and the leaves change colour. We found some leaves which we collected and pressed last year between some paper napkins. We were amazed to see that some of them still looked orange, dark red and even purple. We each got a leaf and held it up carefully to the light to see the colours more clearly. We then got up to dance and move to our ‘Never give up’ song and added another move for the line ‘Our first try may be a flop’. We then moved to the table to do some Autumn colours artwork. We each got a piece of paper and using lots of green, yellow, red, orange and brown crayons we started to colour on the paper. We tried to fill the whole paper with Autumn colours and then helped take all the paper coating off the crayons. Once they were without paper we broke the crayons into small pieces and choosing two colours we put them into a plastic zip-lock bag. We then had some real fun with a hammer crushing the crayon pieces until they were really small. We had to be careful not to hit our fingers with the hammer. We then sprinkled the crayon pieces onto our paper and the teachers then used a special piece of paper called ‘oven paper’ to cover the artwork. The teachers then used an iron to melt the crayon pieces and they spread across the paper really nicely. Some of them mixed to make new colors. Once the crayons had cooled a bit we peeled the oven paper off and saw our beautiful artwork. They look really good and we will work on them a little more soon. Have a great afternoon.