Happy birthday Taiyo

Well, we saw all of the gifts that Santa had left behind yesterday, packed into boxes. They were piled high like a mountain. The “takyubin” will come and collect them tomorrow and send them to the children for us. On the tables this morning were our cookies, our presents that we made for our families and cellophane bags and other pretty things. We looked at the tin of cookies and saw that there were so many cookies; we were able to put nine cookies in each of our bags. So we counted nine cookies and put them onto a pretty napkin that had a picture of a snowman on it. Then we put the napkin together with our gift inside the cellophane bag. We are going to make a card and attach it to the cellophane bag. This is our gift to our families for the coming festive season. When we do activities in our class, we have so many accessories. Sometimes we bring our “babies” with us to the activity tables; sometimes we bring bags filled with fruit and vegetables etc. Mika brought her baby to the table today when she counted out her cookies for her gift bag. We also sometimes wear dress up clothes when we do our activities.

Lucinda had a baby in her tummy today when she was wearing her dress up clothes. She said that she had to take the baby out because the dress was not looking pretty. She was also being a pretend reporter and photographer and took photos of Taiyo, especially since it was his birthday today. He is four years old and we will celebrate with him and his family on Friday. We had some puzzles to do this morning which were of trains. One was 24 pieces; one was 35 pieces and one was 48 pieces and we were able to complete them all quite easily. We think that our teachers need to give us 100 piece puzzles only.

During the morning we did drawings at the table and tried to write our names using our flash cards. Some of us don’t really want to write our names and we complain a little. Our teachers give us lots of encouragement and say that we just need to do our best. They present us with these kinds of activities to challenge us however they do not mind what we do, as long as we try.

Hisami read us a Japanese story and on one of the pages there were some sounds that we can only hear if we listen carefully. When we listened carefully we could hear the sound of a pair of scissors cutting; when we listened carefully we also heard many other noises. Sometimes we use our eyes more than our ears and we don’t really hear all the sounds around us. When we come back to school in January we will start to use the listening centre. You put on head phones and listen to sounds and play games just by listening and then looking.

We played a game on the floor where we did many different actions and we said good morning to our friends and teachers in different languages. We also played a game with the taiko; we moved our bodies in different ways and when the drum hit one loud sound, we shouted “freeze”. We are quite good at freezing and keeping still like statues.

We spent a large part of today smiling and having our photos taken for the Year Book. Besides having individual photos taken, we also had a class one with all of our friends and teachers.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel