Welcome to our First Day of Magical Winter

Our day started off by choosing our morning table activities. We had anagram puzzles, making patterns with blocks and nails on a cork board and sweater craft. Each of the activity required our concentration and coordination of our eyes and hands. Because we are big boys and big girls, we enjoyed the challenge of finding the correct shape for the anagram puzzles and loved hammering our patterns on a cork board and designing our sweaters!

 Meanwhile, our question of the day takes a different look this winter school week. We used to place our name cards on the YES and NO column, but this week, we are going to write our names instead. Today’s question of the day was, “Did you drink hot cocoa?”.  We wrote our names on the column that corresponded to our answer. Look at how well we wrote our names! Sa and Ad counted the tally for the YES and NO columns. They both did well in counting and writing the numerals. Great job! Then Yu told us the total if we would put 8 (on the NO column) and 5 (YES column) together. She said, “It will be 12!”. Good job!

 CIRCLE TIME

 We sang our morning song to introduce ourselves to our friends. Amazingly, all of us were able to sing along! What a way to start our day in Flowers. Vieda asked if there were some who would like to share their feelings today.

            Ak: I’m sad and happy. Sad because it’s winter holidays already. Especially I come to Flowers three times, that is happy!

            Ke: Sad because I almost go to shogakko (primary school) and I will miss everybody!

            Du: I’m happy and sad!

            Yu: I don’t have feelings today.

            Ky: I’m angry because Mommy is not give me present.

 Then, we talked about winter. Ti and Ch volunteered to write the word “winter” on the board. What comes to mind when we hear the word, winter? We came up with 14 words that we associate with winter. Here are they:

            Ch: It’s cold. Snowballs and ice!

            Ak: Snow and bells

            Ke: Almost Christmas and Santa is coming. Kamakura (igloo)

            Li: Skates, playing in the snow and snowball fight

            Sa: Skateboard

            Ti: Snowman!

  STORY TIME

We read a book by Eric Carle called Dream Snow. It was a story about a farmer who had five animals named One, Two, Three, Four and Five. As the farmer dreamed about snow, each of his animals got covered with a snow blanket. We had so much fun guessing what animal was under the snow blanket. There was a page where half of the class said rooster, while the other half guessed it as hen. Sa mentioned that, “A rooster is quite different because I think they are smaller than the hen”. On the other hand, Ch shared that, “A rooster is the daddy and hen is the mommy”. And the answer was…. ROOSTER!

 As we got closer to the end of the story where the farmer gave away gifts, Yu commented, “Oh, there is already snow! It’s already Christmas!”.

 It has not snowed in Tokyo yet. Ke said that he saw a snowy place outside of Tokyo. Perhaps, we will see snow in Tokyo soon as well, and we cannot wait to have a blast playing in it! In the meantime, we had fun singing and dancing Santa Hunt and playing Move and Freeze.

 Speaking of snow, after lunch time, we made our own snowballs from newspapers and had snowball fights! We had such a great time pretending to have a snowball fight in the room. At the end of our game, both teams garnered three points which made all of us champions! Yay!!!

 And just like that, our first day of our magical winter school has ended. We are all looking forward to all the fun that awaits us tomorrow!

 Love,

Flowers XOXO