Otsukimi

9/21/2022 Wednesday

Good morning Petals class! We had an amazing day as always. K was the first one who arrived today. “Mr Potatohead…please?” He asked Nimo if he could play with it. While he was playing, other petals arrived and started playing. S and T joined to play with Mr. Potatohead. S made a silly face for Potatohead. T said, “S’s Potatohead is funny, because this is not how a face looks.”  Then K found that some friends were playing with sea creatures which are his favorite toys. K picked up one of sea creature and asked Nimo, “What animal is this?” He replied, “Octopus.” Then K said, “Oh! Octopus” When T greeted Petals and teachers, K opened his eyes widely and said, “Ohhhh T! T here!”. He was very happy for him to be back and play together. P was playing with the shark, and Nimo asked what he was playing with, P excitedly said, “Shark!”, he also showed a toy car to Sayaka. P touched the car tire and said, “Look, car..Stop!”. G and E enjoyed playing together. They both had a shark and pretended that the shark were chasing each other. G put a small toy fish in the shark’s mouth, “Oh no! Shark!” Then E said, “Shark is eating fish!” 

There were also blocks to play with in our play area. C and R were playing with it. C said, “I’m making a Tokyo Tower.” R used the orange and yellow blocks and said, “Look, Tokyo Tower!”

C started his day with marble paint. “What is that Sayaka?” He asked and said he would like to do that too. After he finished, he stayed in the kitchen with J. They pretended to sell the popsicles and juice. C put the toy apple in the cup and said, “Look, apple juice!” When T was doing marble paint, he was looking at the marble very carefully and said, “Slowly..slowly to roll it!” H seemed had fun doing craft and paint. When the marbles were rolling in the box, he smiled and gazed at them. 

L, G, J, R, and T had book time during free play. They chose the book that they wanted to read. When Sayaka reminded us in 3 minutes to clean up, J said, “3,2,1 clean-up!” 

Today’s circle time was learning about Otukimi which is known as moon-viewing. It is one of the festivals in Japan. We all sat down together for circle time. Sayaka showed us the picture of the full moon. C shared the story when she saw the beautiful moon. 

C-I saw a yellow moon and a rocket ship and a dream. It was a big moon.
Then one of petals shared the idea that there is a school in the moon.
Sayaka-Thats’ very intersting! Do you think…there are people in the moon?
G-Yes, high up! He nodded his head.
R- five! (five people in the moon) Then she showed her five fingers. 

Sayaka-Have you been to the moon? I’ve never been.
G-Me!
C-Me, too!
Sayaka-Have YOU? MOON?
C-Yeah!
T and C-Yes!
Sayaka-How about Nimo? You think, Nimo had been to the moon?
G-Nonono! Too big! Nimo can’t go to the moon.

It was an very interesting conversation. It is always fun to share our imagination with others. Then Sayaka explained how people enjoy moon-viewing. It is the day that people enjoy looking at the beautiful moon. One of the decoration is suzuki and lucky we have it in petals. As Sayaka showed us, we could take to turn to touch and feel it. Some of us smelled it. But…we didn’t relly like the smell.

T-It’s soft.

R-No smell.
K-It’s pretty!

Lastly, she introduced the one of special food for Otsukimi which is dango (mochi). R said, “I eat with grandma, I never seen Suzuki, grandma said..Oishiine”. She added that when she ate dango, there was annko (Black bean paste) inside.

After we came back from park, we had our second circle time. Sayaka read the book, パパ、お月さまとって！エリック・カールさく もりひさし　やく (Daddy please get the moon for me!) The girl in the book's name was Monica who wants to get the moon to play with. She tried to reach it but couldnt. So, she asked her daddy to get the moon. Her daddy used a long ladder to reach the moon. When her daddy reached to the moon, it was too big to take it home. So, he waited for a while and he finally could take it home. Monica really enjoyed playing with it. It was a nice story.

Then we talked about the shape of the moon. T raised his hand and said, “It’s a circle!” Yes, he is right, It’s a circle and round. Before we had our lunch time we had two games. One was try to get “the moon” game. It was a very simple game, Sayaka stuck a pretend moon (we used the small plastic ball) on the white board. It was a bit high and we stretched to try and reach it. We stretched out our arms to reach the moon ball. The other one was fiding the circle. We had different shapes of magnets, squares, triangle, and circles. Our job was to find the circle! After we finished, we had lunch time. 

It was a beautiful day to spend time at the park. We enjoyed playing and felt a little bit chilly. 

Thank you very much and see you all tomorrow!

Love Petals