Free the moth, Le Xin!

10/10/2008 (Friday)

a) Handprint gift for our maid / “kakak”.
T : Do you know that today is our’s maid last day?
Ze yan : Why? Where is she going?
T : She is here only to replace the other maid.
Zi Yang : Where is she?
T : That maid is now in Indonesia. She goes home once in 2 years to meet her family.
Jian Wei : Wah….! So long.
T : She’ll be coming back on Monday. So, do you think we should thank this new maid?
Class : Yes!
 As the maid told me yesterday that she is going to miss the children and she loves to see the caterpillar change into butterflies, so I proposed that we made a butterfly handprint card for her.
 The kids took turns to thumbprint their favourite water colour on the paper. They knew that the prints must link to one another to form a caterpillar’s body.
 Another paper was to thumbprint small butterflies. They liked them

b) Yee Ping gave us a surprise!
 Yee Ping showed me her Helicopter Propeller Toy yesterday.
 So, today I invited her to demonstrate her toy. She was so happy to demonstrate how it flew high into the air. We thanked her. This was exactly the same function as the craft we did yesterday. Then the kids played with their own propeller.

c) A Propeller Hat.
 The next satge was to make our own hat. We used newspaper for this purpose.
 I pasted a paper on the board. Then using the brush, I painted 2 different colours onto it.
Class : Why can’t we have more water in the colour?
T : It would be too wet and this will tear the paper. Furthermore, what do we have on the paper.
Song Chuan : A lot of ink.
T : Good! So the water will make the paper black.
* Some kids used 3 colours, some preferred 1 colour. Some were so excited to see that when the colours mixed, it became a new colour.
* They learnt that yellow and red becomes orange. Blue and red becomes purple. Justin said, “Wow! Red and yellow and blue makes brown!!” Haaa………!
* We leave the paper to dry and will fold it on Monday.

d) Justin’s Birthday!
 Everyone was excited because of party pack………!
 Justin invited his friends from downstairs as well as having us around. We sang “Birthday” songs of 3 languages. He was very happy!

e) An insect’s life cycle.
 Comprises of 4 stages. We took a look at the butterfly’s stages.
 Eggs, nymph (caterpillar), cocoon and adult.
 They thought of examples including flies, dragonflies, beetles, butterflies and moths.
 While in the cocoon, the caterpillar will start forming legs and its simple eyes will be bigger eyes. Its tiny hair would be stuck to its cocoon. This is like changing skin.
 We were quite sad over the weak dragonfly that Teacher Karen gave to us. It was energetic but then towards noon, it became very weak.
 Why?? Kids said: “An adult grasshopper only has 1 week’s life”…….That’s too short!
 Thus, yesterday we put it in the grass near its favourite flowers.
 When we check it today, it went missing. Maybe it recovered and flew away………maybe!

f) Le Xin’s moth.
 The kids learnt that moths are usually brown or grey in colour.
 Le Xin brought us a moth.
Ze Yan : Let it fly away. We don’t want it to die.
Eugene : Give it freedom.
Jin Shan : Let it fly away.
Le Xin : NO!!! I want to see it!
 Due to short of time, I told the class that we had to respect Le Xin’s decision. Later, I had a talk with her. She was very sad and said, “I want her to fly to her mother. And friends.”
 After bedtime, we went to the playground and freed the moth! They were so happy to chase the moth……….love and freedom….