Shichi-Go-San

Dear Flowers Class mommies and daddies,

What a fun day we had today celebrating Shichi-Go-San (lit. "Seven-Five-Three"). It is a traditional rite of passage and festival day in Japan for three- and seven-year-old girls and three- and five-year-old boys, held annually on November 15 to celebrate the growth and well-being of young children. We are very fortunate that our Flowers class parents are so involved in events we celebrate in school and would sincerely like to thank two of our class mums who came to school to celebrate Shichi-Go-San with us today. They showed us a picture of children dressed in traditional Japanese clothes like Kimono for girls and Hakama for boys and told us that on this special day children dress up and go to shrine. Children are also given toys and candies as treats. Then one of the mums showed us her Kimono and recounted that she wore it when she was 5 and 7 years old. We were so excited when she said that the girls can wear it and click pictures. Yeaa!!! It was quiet a complicated process to wear it, especially the belt, and we are grateful to the mums who helped us. We girls felt nothing less than a princess with two mums and teachers helping us get dressed in Kimono complete with the headband, handbag, special socks and Zori sandals. Then Darren clicked our pictures with his special camera.  While the girls were busy dressing up, the boys colored in the picture of children dressed traditionally. After that we swapped and it was boys’ turn to get dressed. Since we didn’t have Hakama, they wore Changshan, the Chinese suit and posed as Kung Fu masters. After the celebration, we had two ‘Show and Tell’ session and with that we all finish our Round 1 of Show and Tell. When the first child started his Show and Tell, we guessed he got a fish, a flower or a toy truck. Finally, he showed us a basket full of acorns, chestnut and pinecones. He also displayed a few pictures he got together with the basket to show us how he plays with them by making a sun, an acorn salad.  He explained that the tree broke and fell and the pine cones and acorn fell to the ground and hence he collected them. Students asked him a lot of questions like why does he like it? Why did he pick it up? Did it fall down easily from the tree? He answered them all very confidently. In the second Show and Tell, we guessed our friend got a flower, a toy car, heart or a necklace. She revealed a beautiful handmade rocket. She explained beautifully how she made it on her own using toilet paper roll and Mickey Minne mouse tape. Few of the questions we asked her were Why did you think of making it? Who do you play it with? Why do you like it? We busted out laughing when she said “I like it because it is cool”. Then we all pretended that the rocket is about to blast off and counted down from 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 Blast Off. Thank you to both our friends for their very special Show and Tell. We also took turns to read to our class the Alphabet Book we are making. It already has sounds s,a,t,i,p,n,c,k,r,e,h,m and d. We will keep adding more pages to it as we go along learning new sounds each week. Mummies and Daddies are welcome to come look at it. We are so proud of making it ourselves with a little help from our teachers. Some of us also worked on previous pages of our Phonics Book and completed it. In the morning free play time, the most popular thing today was the story board. There was a felt board and some felt animals and people. We thought of the characters we need in our story and put them out on the board. Then we drew them on the paper for our very own story. Our teachers always encourage us to be creative and imaginative in our play. Also on the carpet, we enjoyed building blocks and other construction tools and created airplanes and cars. We packed away early today to eat our snack and get ready for Shichi-Go-San.

Wishing you all a great afternoon,

Love, Flowers Class children