Rainy Day

“Rain, rain, go away,

come again another day,

all the children want to play,

rain, rain, go away….”

“Ame ame, fure fure kasan ga,

janome de omukai ureshi na,

pichi pichi, chapu chapu, lan lan lan...”

Do you like rainy days?  The sky was grey, covered in clouds all day long but outside, you can hear the pita-pata sound of the rain and inside, we were so busy!

Sensory Box

This morning, the teachers had placed so many interesting things on the table—big colorful pompoms, connecting people, bean bags and wooden blocks.  Remember we made holes in our sensory boxes?  Well, we experimented what goes through which holes.  K noticed that it was actually fun to line up the connecting people.  A persevered and stayed at the station for a very long time and tried out inserting different objects.

Marble Painting

For today’s art, we used a tray, placed a piece of paper inside and dipped a marble in some paint and...rolled the  marble from one end to another inside the tray!  R and K was busy chasing after the runaway marbles; R was very observant watching other friends tossing the tray and trying it out herself; E was having fun dropping the marble in the tray and hearing the cling-clang sound; K wanted not just one but all the marbles we had and only wanted to use blue paint; A was so immersed in the moment, feeling the paint in her hands which turning all black; U was trying hard to keep the marble inside but the marble kept escaping and rolling out on the floor!

 Balance Beams and Books

If you want a quality time with our teachers, this is the time to get one.  We love jumping and balancing with Tamara and looking at our special Life Books with Goh-san and Erika :) 

 Circle Time

Nelly the elephant was here again and every time she joins our circle, it brightens up our faces :)  We are practicing to use our bigger voices so that she can hear our names.  Then you know what, it’s not like we don’t have big voices, when we want, we can actually put on such big voices.  K surprised us when we were singing Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, instead of using the words, we hummed and lalala-ed!

Our mission for today was to test how much visual recognition we have and you know what, yet again, we surprised our teachers how much we are aware visually!  Nanako placed some animal picture cards on the floor and we matched the cards of the same animal.  Some friends could name the animals on the cards and many could recognize the two matching pairs!  In fact when we read a Japanese book about our hands, called, Te by Setsuko Tonomura, E repeatedly said, “Baba (grandma)” as she saw a page of a hand of a grandma knitting.  Though we may all have hands, they are all distinguishable and unique!  

 Music & Movement

The rain stopped us from going to the park but it didn’t stop us from walking, running, jumping, shaking, swaying, chasing, throwing and keeping us busy!  The teachers noticed that now that we are getting used to our classroom routines, we are able to be quicker especially during transitioning—for example, we are much faster putting our things away in our bags and getting ourselves ready to have our diapers changed (soon some of us won’t be needing diapers anymore)—meaning, we have more time to play after snack!  One of the things we really liked was using our scarves, waving it up, down, to the sides and throwing up high in the air!  We also hid it at the back, looking like we had a tail and ran away from the teachers who tried to get our scarves!

Each day is new and exciting and we are already happy to think about the things we can do next week!

Love from the Buds children xoxo