Welcome Back & Happy New Year

Dear Flowers Class mommies and daddies,

Akemashite omedetô (gozaimasu) ! This means Happy New Years in Japanese. Welcome back to school and we hope the new year brings you and your family joy, peace and happiness. We were so excited to be back and most of us kept chatting about what we did during the winter holidays. In the morning circle, Darren greeted us and welcomed us back to school. Then we counted the number of children in class and realized that we have a small group today since many children are still not back from their vacation. Also, a few of our friends are unwell. We hope that in the next couple of day all our friends will be back and we will have a full class. A new friend joined our class today and we welcomed him very warmly and sang the ‘Hello’ song to introduce ourselves.  When we came to class today, we were very excited to see the cars and parking lot toys on the carpet. After a while, when our teachers learnt that our new friend loves trains, they got the train toys out as well. Hurray! On one of the tables, there were water color painting and spinning tops. In Japan, one of the traditional New Year’s activity is spinning the top and Darren demonstrated us how to do it.  On the other table, we had washi paper and calligraphy ink. We wondered what we are going to do with it. Darren explained that we are going to make a Shuji (Japanese Calligraphy) wall décor art piece. We used washi paper to make a long scroll and then used big painting brush dipped in Calligraphy ink to write Happy New Year in Japanese. Then we attached bamboo sticks to it at the top and bottom and put strings on it so we can hang it on the wall. It took a long time to make it and so only a few of us managed to complete it today. We will be working on it in the next few days. Do look at our beautiful work when you drop us off to school in the morning. After free play, we packed away and sat down for a quick circle time with Darren. Then we had our yummy snacks and went to the park. It was cold and sunny and we enjoyed running around and chasing our friends. When we came back, we had another circle time and discussed about different ways in which we can get from one place to another. Some of our ideas were walking, running, jumping, jogging or taking an airplane, riding a car, a bicycle, a motorcycle, skiing and many more. We also learnt that in olden days, people used animals as a mode of transport. For example, horses, elephants and camels were used to go from one place to another. Transport is our theme for this month and hence in the next few weeks we will be discussing it more elaborately.

Have a great evening,

Love, Darren, Pauline and Pooja