Terrific Taiko with Moko sensei

Taiko drumming is such a cool thing to learn and we were so lucky that Moko sensei gave the entire Ohana International School community a Taiko drumming workshop today. Thank you so much Moko sensei. We loved our lesson today and if you were fortunate enough to attend the class, you would have seen how quickly we learnt the different patterns and games. The main pattern that we learnt was “don, don, ka, ka”. When you play the “don” sound, you play it on the skin of the drum and when you play the “ka” sound, you play it on the rim of the drum. The drum is made from a tree and the skin is the skin of a cow. After we had mastered “don, don, ka, ka” we added in “We love taiko, Ohana”; and then we posed and shouted “Yaaaa…….” We played another game where we played the “don, don, ka, ka” pattern and when we sang “We love taiko”, we walked around our drums. Finally, we did the same thing but instead of walking around our drums, we moved to the drum on the right. So each time, we had a different drum. The final part was watching Moko sensei, Naoko, Taiyo’s mum, Jen from the office and Shelley play “Echo of the Ocean”. Thanks for another amazing Taiko workshop!

Another special thing that happened today was meeting Taiga who is our new friend in Flowers Class and Kaito, from Switzerland, who we met during summer school. Kaito will be with us for a few weeks and Taiga, will be in our class for the rest of this year. Wewere so happy to welcome them both and for them to share a fun first day with us, playing taiko.

Welcome Taiga and Kaito to Flowers Class. We hope that you have fun with us and learn interesting things each day. Taiga made some Halloween daisy chains, cutting out strips of orange and black and looping them into circle shapes and stapling them. Every day we talk about decorating the classroom with our Halloween things but we are so busy and don’t put up some decorations tomorrow as we took the large Halloween box out of the cupboard. We have bowls that look like spiderwebs, containers with ghost faces, small Jack-o-lanterns and so much more. We welcomed Yurika back from her holiday in Hawaii and she brought pineapple shaped cookies for us, which we had as dessert after lunch today. Thank you Yurika chan!

Hisami made spiders with us using beads which we threaded to make the legs, and the bodies were made from pompoms. We learnt that spiders have eight legs, four on each side of their bodies. Our spiders have colourful legs and some of them have colourful bodies too. We will use these as decorations in our classroom. We put some spiders on display with spider webs later in the afternoon with our teachers and we think that they look like real spider. We pretended to be scared of them and we laughed.

When we played the taiko drums, we concentrated because we had to co-ordinate our hands with the sticks, hit the skin of the drum, hit the rim of the drum, pose at the end with a big voice and shout “yaaaa”; as well as remembering Moko sensei’s instructions. There was a professional photographer so there will be lots more photos to see from her. Before we left to walk in the light rain to the Azabu Kumin Center, we made some more daisy chains, we played an insect dominoes game and we made the spiders.

Thanks for a fabulous day of laughter, learning and taiko drumming.

We are glad that the weather cleared up and we trust that the weather man will take care of the weather on Friday and make the sun shine.

Love always, all the children in Flowers Class.