Shichi-go-san
It was windy last night and early in the morning today. Some friends were telling teachers how windy it was. Here is what we did today:
Color sorting station
We enjoyed sorting pom-poms and transparent plastic chips by color. We had a cupcake pan on the table and each cup has a different color on the bottom. Just looking at this made us want to sort things by colors. We wonder why. S was staring at the cupcake pan first and recognized what color he could see there, then he started to put pom-poms in each holder. W came by and sorted as well, and taught R gently, who was walking by the table, how to do it. N also did a great job with her teddy! When she dropped some plastic chips on the floor, she was pretending her teddy was trying to help her. N liked those transparent plastic chips and collected them in a cup. She looked very satisfied with a lot of them!
Clean the pumpkins!
We had small pumpkins, mesh bath sponges and some water on the sensory table! We scrubbed pumpkins using sponges. The first friend who came to this station was L. He was making sure he cleaned everywhere on the pumpkin that he was working on while he was scrubbing it. J saw it and brought some cars from the car area and started to wash them beside L, and this station turned to be a “pumpkin/car wash”. R was having fun with splashing water and we had some good chuckles together.
Seven-five-three ceremony treat bag
November 15 is the day we celebrate “Shichi-go-san” in Japan. Shichi-go-san (standing for the ages of seven, five and three) is a traditional Japanese ceremony celebrating the growth of children and wishing for their continued good health. When visiting the shrine for Shichi-go-san, you will receive a big rectangle paper bag which has a long stick-shaped candy called “chitose-ame(千歳飴)” inside. So today, we pretended we would celebrate “Shichigosan” and decorated the bags for ourselves with Japanese patterned origami. We all did the same thing, but it was interesting to see how each friend did it. K and K put origami pieces on the glue stick. J and E spread glue on where they wanted to place origami first, then put origami pieces there. No matter how each friend did it, everyone made pretty treat bags :)
Colorful tunnels
Cars are very popular toys to play with in Buds Class. Today we had colorful tunnels in the car area. L figured out they were the tunnels and put a car through one of the tunnels. Friends who saw what he did followed it and we had fun in a different way from how we usually do.
Circle Time
When we hear the sound of the piano, that means we will have a circle time soon. We sat down in a circle, and saw what teachers brought for us today, it’s a 紙芝居(picture-story show)! That was a picture of a chef but he looked grumpy. We tried to make him happy and tried different things, we shook him, we said “choo-choo-chugga-chugga” because he might like trains like we do, but it didn’t work. Teachers thought it was very hard to make him happy and asked us “Shall we just say goodbye to the chef?”, but J said “No!”, and just like him, none of Buds friends wanted to give up making him happy. Finally, he showed us a big smile and made us lollipops. Since we saw a lot of facial expressions of the chef in this picture-story show, we also got a chance to talk about happy faces and angry faces. After that, we talked about “Shich-go-san”. Teachers showed us a paper puppet in “Kimono” and we learned that Kimonos are traditional Japanese clothes. Then we read the shichi-go-san related book “大きくなったね(You are big now)” together and learned what we do at shichi-go-san ceremony. While we were reading this book, we also talked about how we were when we were little babies. We had a lot of milk everyday. We sometimes got upset and cried a lot. We slept a lot… We know that we are not small babies anymore! At last, each of us got an origami paper and made kimonos.
Park Time
It was warm again today. We went to the step park and had a nice outdoor play time.