Who Are in my Family?

Happy Friday everyone! We have been enjoying sharing what we like about ourselves with our friends. By doing so, we feel that we get to know them more!  This morning, we worked on making our special cards for our grandparents. We love our grandparents so much, so we were eager to make these cards as special as them. We cut out heart shapes out of art crumpled paper. Then we took collage materials to decorate them. Last but not the least, we wrote our special message for them! Please look forward to these cards and enjoy reading our heartfelt messages!

            For morning play activities, we had so much fun building towers and tall buildings with cork block and letters as well using wooden materials. Y displayed his alphabet skills by saying the letter names as he built the letters. D joined him, too and said, “This is fun!”.

            Before we headed to the park, we had a special time for N who celebrated his birthday yesterday. We had a short question and answer with him, too!
            K: How big is your mouse?

            N: It’s this small.

            Me: Mouse are small. They have a white or black tail on the bottom.

            C: What foods do you like?

            N: I like suika. Watermelon

            U: He actually doesn’t like watermelon.

            Me: What do you have at home?
            N: I have hamster, fish, hermit crabs, tento mushi, and a rabbit.

            K: How much food did you eat?

            N: Five faijtas!

            D: I don’t know that!
           U: Fajitas are circle things and you put vegetables in it.

CIRCLE TIME
            Our circle time started with a song that goes like this, “I am special, so are you!”. We are all special. We may look different on the outside, but we are all special in our own ways.  It made us wonder what we think makes each of us special.

            D: I don’t know!
           U: I think D is special because he lives in a different country.

 M: My Dad was born in America. My Mom was born in Japan. My sister and me speak half English and half Japanese.

            Perhaps knowing what our friends like or dislike could help us think what makes them special. Vieda showed us some picture cards and asked us to share what food we like and dislike.

            Vieda: Do you like eggs, Ra?

            Ra: He looked and pointed at the eggs and nodded.

            Au: Corn. I like corn.

            U: I like vegetables but there’s one kind of soup that I don’t like. It’s kinda yellow and has onions in it.

            Me: I like watermelon, but I don’t like carrots.

            N: I like corn, but I don’t like lemons.

            Z: I like onigiri, but I don’t like lemons.

            D: I like cookies!
           Y: I like carrots, but I don’t like eggs.

            C: I like tuna, but I don’t like grapefruit.

It was interesting to note that some of us like the foods that our friends do not, and vice versa. We realized that we can also show our respect to our friends by not saying yuck when they bring food to school that is something that is our least favorite. We are so lucky to be learning simple lessons in life that can help us build on relationships based on love and respect.  Way to go, Flowers!

Talking about families, we worked on counting and matching the numerals to it. We counted the number of friends’ name tags on the question of the day. We tried to count some of our friends’ families, too! As a class, we tried to complete a family picture as we identified each of its members. When it was Me’s turn to pick on family member, she paused for some time before choosing a picture. Then she looked up to the teacher and said, “Oh no. There is no right size for Y!”. On the other hand, D picked up the family counters as he mentioned each of the family members. He continued on, “This is mommy, daddy, sister St and baby. The baby is me!”.  U’s turn came and she said, I have 10 in my family! I have lots of pets!”.

            K raised his hand and said that he wanted to count his family, too. He took several family counters and counted them. “Mommy, Daddy, sister, me, robot dog, So and Su. I have 7. My helpers are my family, too!”. Me looked at a word and carefully sounded out each letter. Then she said, “Pets!”. Good job!

 GROUP ACTIVITY

            Vieda mentioned that we were going to make two special people today. One group can choose one person in their group to trace, while the other group will make their person out of junk materials. We spent our group activity sharing ideas with our friends. We asked each other, “Who wants to trace? Who will cut?” or “Can we use this for the head? How about for the body?”. Our teachers looked at our works and said, “Wow! This is so amazing!”. We will continue to work on these next week! We were so engrossed with our special people that we did not notice that it was past our lunch time already.

  We hope you had a FANTASTIC FRIDAY, too! Please have a wonderful weekend everyone!

 Love,

Flowers