Welcome back Giorgia

We welcomed Giorgia back after a long time. She spent summer until now in Italy and came back to Tokyo yesterday. She was so happy to see us and we were sooooo happy to see her and her mum, Rosella, too. She spent a lovely day playing and having fun with us and we look forward to seeing her each day here with us in Petals Class. We started off our day with some free play and then had an early circle time. We did a large floor puzzle of an airport and at the small white table; we had a matching game with pictures of things from nature. There were different flowers, fruit, leaves, seeds etc. The reason for our early circle time was because we had materials on the table and our teachers wanted to talk about them. We looked at the different people who we see in the neighbourhood each day and for the first time, we noticed that there were two people in blue uniforms; one of them was a lady and one was a man. Michaela recognized that the lady was a policewoman and we all thought that the man was a policeman. However, when we observed their clothing carefully we saw that they were not exactly the same. The man was actually a pilot; he is the man who flies an airplane together with the co-pilot. We then looked at a selection of junk art material and Shelley asked us what we think we could make with the boxes, toilet rolls etc. We started to work together on the mat and create a person. This was our project at the table. We took tissue boxes, toilet rolls, egg

cartons, plastic cups, coffee cups lids, scoops for baby’s milk powder etc. We designed our people and our teachers helped us attach the parts to one another so that they would be strong. Our people will become different characters as our project evolves. We will be given the opportunity to choose what we want them to be. Nina wants her one to be a princess; Koh wants his to be a doctor; Michaela also wants hers to be a doctor; Vincent wants his to be a firefighter; William L wants his to be a policeman. Soon we will all choose what we want to make our people into.

In our gymnastics class with Tanaka sensei today, we learnt how to do somersaults. In Japanese you call them “maemawari”. We all did so many of them during our class and by the end of the lesson we could almost do them without any help. Michaela was really good at them. We had to stand on our feet, bend down and put our hands near to our toes; then we looked at our belly button hiding underneath our clothes, put our chin on our chest and tuck our heads in. One, two, three and we rolled over. It was so much fun. When we had done two, we went to sit on the line and make a mountain with our legs. The third time that we did them, when we got up off the mat, we had to jump rather than walk to the line. Our second fun new thing that we played today involved walking around the mats and when Tanaka sensei blew his whistle, we had to sit down on our bottoms on the mat, so that nothing could “nibble” them. We tried to do this as quickly as possible. We really love our Japanese gymnastics lessons.

We forgot to tell you that Giorgia brought us a clock from Italy as a gift. It looks like Pinocchio, and the second hand is his friend Jiminy Cricket and he moves all the time. We love looking at it and want to say thank you to Giorgia and her mum and dad, for our gift. It will help us learn how to tell the time.

Our story today was another “big book”. In fact, we have the same book in a small book on our library shelf. It is called “Rosie’s Walk”. We looked at the pictures really carefully to see what happened to the fox. He was following Rosie the hen because he wanted to eat her. But in the end, he didn’t.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.