Happy Shichigosan

Today we spent the whole day indoors because of the weather and had fun being extremely creative with our art as well as our bodies, in our Yoga class. Because we take a long time to dress our people in their specific professions, we are working one to one with our teachers. Today Lucinda almost completed her farmer; Koh chan made his doctor; Luka made a surgeon and Lilian worked on her Chef. When we are making our people, we look on the shelf and take any collage materials that we want to use for them. Today we took coloured paddle pop sticks, wiggly eyes, pipe cleaners, material, straw, cardboard and glue. We pasted things on for our facial features and dressed our people in clothes that we thought made them look like a doctor, surgeon, chef, and farmer.

During the morning we celebrated Shichigosan, with our teachers and friends by having a photo taken in our “hand made” kimonos. We held our “chitose-ame” bags and did our best to smile for the camera. Some of our friends dressed in real kimono and hakama for their professional photographs today.

We sat together on the mat and put “chitose-ame” inside our bags which we took home. These are special candy that children eat when it is Shichigosan. They come in a long bag which is a symbol for a long life. The bags are long and the candy comes in its own long bag.

During the morning we had fun singing and moving our bodies to a CD. On the CD there was a song that was the same tune as Mickey Mouse’s marching tune. We marched, skipped, hopped and did many different actions in time to the music. Sang songs with actions too e. g. the bus song, Incy Wincy Spider, Five little monkeys and many more. We had lots of energy because we didn’t go outside today. After being really active and moving our bodies with plenty of energy, we did some relaxing Yoga. Whenever we do Yoga, we need to focus on our breathing and try to rest our body and our mind. We did balancing poses on one leg; this one was called the tree pose; we put the soles of our feet together and then tried to lie flat on our feet; we lay on our tummies and lifted our heads up by pushing our hands down on the floor and straightening our arms. This one was called the cobra pose. There are so many poses and we are willing to try them all. When we did the table pose, Shelley brought a bowl and put it on our tummies to see if our tables were flat like real tables.

We also had a snack with a difference today. Our large table had the light disc on it with lots of art materials so we didn’t have space to have our snack. So Hisami thought and thought and then she had a fantastic idea. Why don’t we have a picnic snack inside our classroom? And that is exactly what we did. We sat on our lovely picnic mat, put our placemats down on it and then put our snack and bottles on our placemats. We enjoyed having an indoor picnic today. We need to also tell you what preempted this decision. During our free play time, we get very involved in imaginative games. Well almost all of us created a make believe picnic with food, utensils, plates, bowls, drinks etc during our play. This took a long time to set up as we needed to use the small scarves for our picnic mat and then we brought all the things that we needed to put on it. When we were ready, we sat down together and sang our snack time song, just as we do when it is our real snack time. This is what gave Hisami the idea to have a real picnic for snack time.

We loved the idea of this and enjoyed pretending that we were outside enjoying a picnic in the sunshine. Today there was actually no warm sun so all of our activities were indoors. We think that our teachers were really glad not to have to go outside into the cold.

We did threading at the one activity table and you can see Lilian adorned herself with lots and lots of jewellery that she had made there.

Thanks for another fun day at school and tomorrow our teachers will talk to us about bringing Christmas Presents for the children in Minamisanriku. We know that they sent an email to our mums and dads about this.

Stay warm and dry tonight!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.