Happy New Year & Welcome Lucinda

Welcome back and a very Happy New Year. We hope you all had a great time and enjoyed the New Year break. We were excited to see the children this morning and we welcomed Lucinda from petals class this morning. A big happy Hello from all your new friends in Flowers class! We started the morning with some traditional Japanese new year activities. On the smaller table Ayaka introduced the children to Japanese Shuji (Calligraphy). This is the year of the sheep and so we wanted to learn how to write ‘Hitsuji’ (Sheep) in Japanese as well as the word for year. We started by practicing to use the large brushes with just water on some dark blue paper which helped us get used to the control needed. After a short while we used black ink on washi (Rice Paper). The paper is about 1 meter long and so we needed to write quite big letters and characters. The word ‘Hitsuji’ is made of 3 characters with the word year being made of a 4^th character. We did a great job with this and then moved to the second table where we saw a big piece of wood covering the table as well as a saw and some long pieces of bamboo. The bamboo will be used on the top and bottom of the paper ‘shuji’ to hold it on the wall. With the teachers help we used the saw to cut each length of bamboo into 4 pieces. It was a little difficult at first but we soon got the hang of it. On the carpet area Lucinda, Adam, Marc and Ryan all enjoyed playing with the marble blocks and used all of them from the box to make a ‘marble run’. It was great to see them enjoying themselves and getting on so well. Nile, Noa and Rico enjoyed time together playing in the toy kitchen and dress up area too. Jennifer, Jeremy and Jessica all started to make cards for Marc’s birthday later in the month and it is great to see their fine motor skills improving so much. Well done guys!! After packing away the toys and having snack we headed for the park as we heard it was due to rain today. We were very lucky as it has been dry all morning. We took along a selection of balls to play with as the netted green area in the park has been reopened recently. We played soccer together for a while and it was surprisingly warm. The pansies we planted before the winter break looked good but a few of the older plants will need to be removed soon. After we came back from the park we looked at the beautiful calligraphy we made in the morning and Nile and Jennifer helped us by telling us that Hitsuji means ‘sheep’ and the last character means ‘year’. Unfortunately we couldn’t remember which animal represented last year but the teachers told us it was the year of the horse. We read a book together about the stars called ‘How to catch a star’. Our second traditional Japanese new year activity of the day was to decorate our own wooden spinning top. The spinning tops we looked at were all brightly colored and were spun using our fingers. The wooden ones use a piece of string wrapped around the center. It looked really funny after coloring the wooden top as when it span the colors all merged together until it slowed down a little. We moved to the table and all decorated our own spinning top with colored markers. After quiet time we were able to play with the spinning tops together on the floor area. Have a great afternoon.