Our sleigh is filling up for Santa

We spent such a long time on our activities this morning and doing circle time, we only went for a short walk in the neighbourhood so that we could see “Who are the people in the neighbourhood?

That we meet on the street each day”, just like our song asks.

We started off our day completing our sleighs for Santa as he is coming to collect our gifts to take to the children in Minamisanriku for their Christmas Party. We added holly which we made out of origami paper. Hisami drew the shape of the leaves and Alexis and Mika cut them out. Vincent, Lucinda and Daiki made the red fruit using newspaper and red tissue paper. They squeezed the newspaper into the shape of a ball and then covered the ball with red tissue paper. We also made cupcakes with pom poms inside for decorations and added white fluffy cotton for snow.

When we had completed decorating both sections of the sleigh, Hisami went to our friends in Buds and Flowers classes to collect the gifts just like Santa. Except when Santa goes in his sleigh, it is laden with gifts however this time, we are collecting the gifts and filling up our empty sleigh. When we came back, our sleigh was a lot heavier as Flowers and Buds class has already collected a few gifts. We want to remind our mums and dads to send gifts to our class so that we can also fill the sleigh up.

At the activity tables Mika and Miyu spent the morning putting together two puzzles that were the shape of a dinosaur and a bull. Each piece has a letter of the alphabet on it and instead of our teachers helping them, they each had an alphabet chart which they used as a guide so that they knew what letter came next. Lucinda also started doing one of them however instead of using the alphabet chart, she sang the ABC song over and over to herself and then she knew what letter came next.

During our circle time this morning, we sang our old “Hello” song and sang “my name is…………” We also did some actions and said hello in a few different languages. Even though we are bigger now, we still like to do some of the things that we learnt last year; and we love singing our favourite songs over and over. Maryna brought some fantastic books from her house, which belong to her son, Toshiki. They contain pictures and information all about people and their work. There is a captain of a ship; a shinkansen driver; a monk; a fire fighter; a mechanic; a construction worker; an actor etc. We looked at one of the books and will keep them in our library so that we can study all about professions, vocations, careers etc.

We then stood up in a circle and sang a new song about hobbies. A hobby is something that you really enjoy doing and you do it regularly. Maybe some of our after school classes can be considered to be hobbies e. g. one of Vincent’s hobbies is soccer; one of Lucinda’s hobbies is drama; one of Alexis’s hobbies is playing the piano. When we sang the song, Shelley sang that one of her hobbies is painting; Hisami’s was cooking; Liezel’s was singing; Lucinda’s was picking flowers and Vincent’s was collecting rocks. We will try to think about things that we like to do that can be considered hobbies when we sing the song in the future.

Today Shelley left school early to go to teach English at Komaba which she does once a month.

We hope that all of our friends stay warm this afternoon as it is a really cold day in Tokyo. We are glad that it is not snowing here like it is in the USA.

Thanks for a fun day at Ohana.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.