Typhoon Lan and Typhoon Dance

October 23rd, 2017

Dear Parents,

What a windy day it is today and many of our friends couldn’t come to school because of that, also some of our friends are travelling because of their older siblings Autumn break. We had a quiet day today with 12 friends in all. We welcome our friend E who returned from the U.K after a really long holiday. We joked that she got the typhoon with her J . E settled in quickly into her new classroom routines surprising all of us.

Today we did something different and watched the news about Typhoon Lan. We learnt that listening to the news can help us learn about the things that happen around us and in the world. Our teachers shared that they got to know about Typhoon Lan hitting Japan from the news and hence were prepared for evacuation in case of an emergency. In the news clip, we saw that typhoon is spiral shaped and when it comes, the winds are very strong and is accompanied by rain. The video showed a lady’s hair flying in the wind, tress moving vigorously, child struggling to walk and umbrellas going upside down due to the strong winds. Then we did a small typhoon experiment in the class. Pooja added two drops of food coloring on warm water and we saw the color make spiral on the bowl of water. It looked like the typhoon picture we saw in the video.

After that, we went for a short walk in the neighborhood and our main purpose was to watch out for any disasters from the typhoon. We did observe many plant pots had knocked down, one part of the tree was hanging, and we felt that it was almost going to fall over, one umbrella was just hanging upside down. We also felt wind on our faces, cold and strong. Our hair was flying and so our Ohana flag outside the school. But we are so happy to see the clear blue sunny skies. Our teachers mentioned that its best to go to Skytree or Tokyo Tower after the typhoon since the sky is clear and the view is great.

 Back at school, we did typhoon dance in small groups to fast instrumental music. We had to follow the beat and go round and round as in spirals with our dance partners and that was so much fun.

We also participated in our weekly gym session with Miyashita sensei. Our main focus today was to develop our sense of balance through various activities like spreading arms to the side and keep balance with one feet off the ground, catching and throwing ball and more. We also did lots of stretching activities for flexibility and strength. At the end, like always, we played a very fun game of ‘hot ball’, much like dodge ball in which the sensei threw the ball and we had to run away from it because it was supposed to be very ‘hot’. If the ball touched our body, we were out. This was a very fun game and of course we won from the teachers.

We were still in the ‘Railway Museum’ mode and loved playing with trains. We also enjoyed doing all the Halloween crafts and completed our ghosts and bats today. We are looking forward to displaying it in our class now. Our teachers encouraged us to suggest where we would like to display it in our class and we all gave our opinions. In our sensor tub today, we saw hand monsters, ’oooooooooooooooooo’ some of us said when we saw it. Our teachers filled gloves with colored water and hid some scary insects, googly eyes and sparkly bits inside. We had to use a hammer to break the ice hand and rescue the eye balls and insects and other bits from inside the hand. One of our friends decided to break all the ice fingers from the ice hands and placed all the ice fingers together in a side. It was so spooky as they began counting the fingers after that. Halloween is our most awaited event now. We are so excited!

Enjoy the rest of your day and stay safe!

Love,

All of us in Petals Class