Rain, rain, go away!

Our "Hows the weather?" song today was a bit redundant: answer "It's really raining, raining, raining!" We found a monster caterpillar munching the leaves on one of our plants - it's huge! We could see his mouth moving and legs pumping as he changed branches. What is it going to be? And what colour....?

Last month I posted about the dangers of papier mache (and the fun bits) and you will have seen the final results of our mask making? Next on the list of "This is going to be messy" is large scale painting. I decided against a tarp on the floor and full body splattering! We still needed full body-armour, in the guise of waterproof smocks, to prevent accidental coverage - Hina still managed to paint her whole calf red without anyone noticing...

Our rainy day mission was to build a couple of houses, complete with windows and doors, out of some of the junk we've collected lately - we've a kitchen-full of cardboard boxes and so on. Little fingers beware cutters, but we decided together where windows would go, and what shapes we wanted - very important to keep the shapes and use them for decoration later. This is the rainy day we save for!

Gluing bits on is tough if the cardboard is shiny, like Jim's wine casks, as is painting them. Tear the top layer off if you can. There are no building codes on colours, so experiment time with mixers - careful everything doesn't end up shades of brown!

While we waited for things to set or dry out, we made special dice for "What's the time, Mr. Wolf?" which is really our favourite game at the moment....everyone wants to be Mr. Wolf!

Bubbles & Squeeks

On Friday we finally finished our papier mache masks in pre-school. We realised we needed to varnish them before adding a decorative layer of paint, and that it needed time to dry! Fortunately, it was a nice sunny day, and we got the job done fabulously!

I think these masks are fairly robust and should last for a while. Painting them on the inside was a good way to make sure they don't delaminate (the vaseline we used to prevent the paper sticking to the plasticene also stopped it sticking to itself!

In between layers, we tested out our very fancy bubble machines, and had a hoot chasing big lumbering ones, and tiny bouncy ones, up the riverbank. We also tried to land them in the river from the bridge, but they blew so far away we couldn't see where they went!

For some reason the girls decided the spare box was a bath, so we learned a new Super Simple song - about the things we do in the bath, of course! Washing our noses and toes, for example. It was very funny as they kept falling out of the bath in stitches.

Our absolute favourite new game is is "Mr. Wolf"...and the children love to be 'it' or Mr. Wolf, and decide what time to call out. This is quite tricky, as they have to hold up the right card with the number on it or the Wolf card - can't let people get to close or they win; too far away when you shout "It's time to eat you!" and it is very hard to catch anybody running away!

Learning thread

I opened a new bag of letter beads and this amazing strand landed right way up on the carpet.

It's a kind of magic?!?!

The girls made necklaces and bracelets with their names on, after a very creative morning painting our papier mache masks, which have dried nicely.

We also remembered to log the growth of our balcony garden - we water them carefully every morning. We've got tall twisty things climbing up the railings; we've got small round leaves and frail shoots; round leaves, pointy leaves, long leaves; smooth stems and rough ones...and that's just the children!

Seem to be a lot of sleepy, smiley people wandering around this morning, needing coffee or genki drinks to wake them up; big congrats Japan on making the next round in South Africa. One report called them the "Blue Brazil" no less!