Happy Japan Day!

February 21st, 2018

Dear Parents,

Konichiwa! Happy Japan Day! Japan is also called the ‘Land of the rising sun’. Japanese people call their country ‘Nippon’, which means source of the sun. Today we celebrated Japan with 6 mums - Hideko (A’s mum), Yuko (S’s mum), Karin (An’s mum), Kyoko (Tai’s mum), Aki (Mar’s mum) and Ayako (Mi’s mum) and had so much fun. We started by singing them a surprise song – ‘It’s a small world’ in English and then in Japanese ‘Sekai wa’. They were so proud of us and cheered us on by clapping.

We are a large group of children and hence we split in two groups to do the activities and then swapped so that we all get to do both activities. One group washed hands to do a cooking activity, while the other group got ready to play a Japanese game called ‘Tamaire’. It is a very fun game of shooting balls and we had to use our hand eye coordination to shoot our ball inside the basket. Then at the end we counted the number of balls we shot in the basket in English and then in Japanese. The mums had made balls with newspaper and we thought that it was so creative. Hideko, Ayako and Kyoko helped us to play this game.

Karin, Yuko and Aki led the cooking activity ‘tofu mochi’ with the other group.  They made the dough for this in advance, by mixing tofu and rice flour. We all got a ball of this dough and Er commented, “play dough”. It was very funny when she said that because it did look and feel like play dough that we were playing with this morning. We made small balls or long snakes with this dough and then passed it to Karin to boil it in the slow cooker. When it was boiled, she sieved it and placed it in a bowl of cold water. Our mochi was then ready to eat with the yummy toppings of kinako, maple syrup and brown sugar syrup.

When we finished doing both the activities, Hideko read to us a Japanese book called ‘Tebukuro’ and Ayako read to us ‘Kingyo ga higeta’. Then we clicked a group picture and got ready for our snacks. The mums served us the yummy mochis we made along with the beautiful pink and blue mochis that Karin got for us from home. They were so delicious!! Mmmmmmm!! Thank you, mums, for your time and generosity. We loved playing a typical Japanese game ‘Tamaire’ and eating traditional Japanese Mochi.

We made the continent of Antarctica in our sensorial table with while cotton balls, which we thought looked like ice and pictures of Antarctic animals like-. Ant, Li and Wi we were interested to know the names of the different animals and kept asking ‘What’s this?’

We did something very interesting today by mixing our slime with play dough. They were both old and kind of dried up and hence we mixed it together to experiment, and to our pleasant surprise, it became like fluffy slime and we had fun playing with it.

Pernille started with us a new group project, a Paper Mache ‘Hot air balloon’. Today we started by snipping the newspaper into small pieces, which is great for strengthening our fingers. Then we dipped it in glue mixture and stuck it on the inflated balloon. We will continue to stick many layers of newspaper on the balloon tomorrow till it’s very thick.

We had a very busy day today and did many fun activities. We also went to the park to play and enjoyed a lot. Thank you once again Hideko, Yuko, Karin, Kyoko, Aki and Ayako. We can’t wait too celebrate India Day on Friday with Shweta (Ry’s mum), Ashwini (Ri’s mum) and Vanessa (Av’s mum).

See you all again tomorrow!

Sayonara!

Love,

All of us in Petals Class