The last day of Channukah
December 10th, 2018
The Christmas spirit is in full swing in Flowers Class and together with the first true winters day in Tokyo, we feel that now, Christmas and winter have arrived. While welcoming Christmas and winter today, we said goodbye to Channukah because last night was the last night of Channukah. So today, we lit all eight candles and the shamash and had nine magical Channukah candles burning in our class room. We still have our spinning tops to play with during the week and then we will pack them away until next year. There are so many beautiful things happening at this time of the year and tomorrow we will have another celebration. It is going to be our December birthday friends’ party in our class. We are so excited to cook with them and do another activity which their families have planned for us. It is a good thing that we will have many things to do indoors because we anticpate that it will be another really cold day here in Tokyo. When it is cold here, it means that there is a lot of snow nearby…………..which means that for those of us who love skiing, we will soon be on the slopes. In fact, Kai and Nimo went snowboarding on the weekend but there was not enough snow for them to display their professional snowboarding skills, but they still had fun.
Today it was our usual and unusual Monday with some things that we know take place in our schedule, however in preschool, there is nothing usual about any day. So many things happen in our day that change the schedule, add to the schedule and keep us learning and playing with our friends and teachers.
Today, in the afternoon, after rest time we played a challenging memory matching game. When we play the traditional matching memory game, there are always two cards that look exactly the same, and we turn two cards over at a time, to see if they match. We are expected to look carefully when our friends turn their cards over and remember where their cards were, in case we have a matching one, when it is our turn. These cards had an extra challenge because they were not exactly the same. There were many similarities in the matching cards but they did not look exactly the same. Here is a picture of one pair so that you understand what we mean.
During the morning we continued making decorations for our classroom using red and green strips of paper which we cut up last week. We have made flowers, stars, trees, a car, daisy chains, balls, gingerbread men, stockings and more. We will continue making some tomorrow if we have time before or after our birthday party.
We played with play dough and rolled and cut it into different shapes. We completed the ballet puzzle (because today is Maryna’s Monday ballet class) and then started doing the Spiderman one. We completed making our names using our flash cards and coloured matchsticks. Once again, it was quite complicated for those of us who have curved letters, which is probably all of us. The coloured matchsticks are straight and when we look at lower case letters, we notice that there are many letters with curve shapes e. g. an upper case A has only straight lines while a lower case “a” has mostly curved lines.
In gymnastics most of the exercises we know and are practicing them so that we can do them properly. The one that we are trying to do is throw a ball from our shoulder. Miyashita sensei placed a long rope on the floor and we held the ball on one of our shoulders, ran to the line, and threw it from our shoulder to Miyashita sensei. Our teachers noticed that we developing our skills each week and are learning to look where we want to throw the ball. Some of us look at the person talking to us and not the person receiving the ball. This is all a part of learning how to focus on a task using our eyes, our mind and our body; which can be a bit tricky for some of us.
We did some deep breathing after gymnastics as our energy level is always very high. You should have seen how “loud and proud” we were when we practiced our songs for our Winter Holidays party. Some of us reminded Shelley about stickers because we love stickers. After lunch we all had a chance to choose a sticker. Shelley believes that it is so easy for children to learn the words of songs without pressuring them. We have proved her correct.
On the floor we played with people from different countries and we used animal counters. When we play with these toys, we create imaginative games and make up stories. Our teachers had a HUGE smile on their faces this morning when we were using the pointer finger, and singing “ZERO PLASTIC”. We sang it so many times and when we moved on to sing “We are the world”, we continued pointing to words of “ZERO PLASTIC” even though we were singing “We are the world”. We love singing songs in class and are so excited as our Winter holiday party draws near.
Thanks for a warm day inside the classroom.
OXOXOXOX All the Flowers Class children