Kakizome

Today, we welcomed another new friend :)   For the new comers, there are still a lot of challenges to face each day as they have to get used to the new environment, routines and faces!  Can you believe that the oldies Buds who used to be so little look so much bigger now being the senpai brothers and sisters for our new friends.  This morning we had John John come downstairs to entertain us with his piano performance and it made us all so quiet and calm.  We LOVE music in Buds! Thank you John John! 

Here is what our day looked like...

Kakizome

Traditionally in Japan, we do something called kakizome—Chinese calligraphy in the New Years to express a word(s) or phrase for the year.  Being still quite young, we may still not have the words to express but we can never be stopped from being creative.  As we are focusing on SHAPES for the next few weeks in Buds, we used a paint brush and some wooden blocks to make our own shapes on the paper.   We loved the feeling of freely stroking the brush to make lines and squiggles with sumi—black ink—and stamping the blocks to make squares, circles and rectangles. 

Paper Clay and Threading

We continued on the threading activity which we started yesterday using paper clay and pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks.  With the help of Tamara, we first rolled some clay in our hands and then tried sticking it through a popsicle stick or a pipe cleaner.  We couldn’t get enough of the soft and malleable texture!

BIG Lego Blocks

Sometimes we like to think BIG and do BIG things.  The big sized Lego blocks are perfect to make towers and house that are taller than our own body size!  Goh-san kindly guided us how to stack the pieces together and we had so much fun building things together!

Small Lego Blocks

With the small Lego blocks, we played creatively and collaboratively with our friends.  It makes it more fun knowing that our friends share the same likings!  We made tall and long creations and moved them around the classroom—puff puff toot toot off we go!

Circle Time

We started our circle time singing familiar songs to our old and new friends like The Wheels on the Bus, Itsy Bitsy Spider and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  We then sang our Good Morning song and introduced ourselves to each other.  Our senpai Buds friends were such good role models for our new friends in showing how to say the names nicely and loudly.  We also read a book called Maisy Goes to Nursery by Lucy Cousins and we listened to the story about how Maisy enjoys the things she likes to do at her school such as paining, reading stories, singing and playing outside.  Hey, that’s just what we do :)

Park Time

Honestly speaking, in the morning there was a bit of ‘racket’ in the classroom.  After a big commotion of taking off the indoor shoes, putting on the outdoor shoes, putting on the jackets and sachets, we were finally ready to go out!  The next challenge was to keep holding on to the rope and keep walking…and guess what, we made it to the park!  We also got to see our Petals and Flowers’ friends and teachers :) What else, when we came back to the classroom, the ‘racket’ eased…:) 

Thank you for another fun day!

Love, Buds Class Children