We can all do "Shuji"
Each day is filled with new and exciting things to do in our classroom. Today we showed our skills at doing “Shuji” which is Japanese calligraphy. The kanji or Chinese character that we learnt was the one for sheep, since it is the year 
of the sheep/ram. Hisami had already created the character on a piece of paper and we took a calligraphy brush and together with her, we made lines on the page, by just using the brush and no ink. After this, we dipped the calligraphy brush into black ink and made the shapes all by ourselves. You can see from the photos, how we 
replicated the vertical and horizontal lines.
Hisami then held our hand and together we wrote our names down the side of the paper, in Hiragana. Shelley had an Ohana stamp made in Vietnam, so we used this and made the Ohana stamp on our paper on the bottom. 
Our teachers will attach our “Shuji” to bamboo and we will hang them up in our classroom. We really loved making them and look forward to doing some more “Shuji” during the year.
Koh chan and Miyu chan each made their fans this morning. They learnt how to flip and fold the paper really well and quickly finished their work. We forgot to tell you yesterday, we made little boxes for our plants that we are going to plant on the 3rd floor in the Discovery Area. We will each have a container for our seeds and soil and once we have varnished ours, Darren will attach them to the lattice upstairs. 
We are still waiting for some more friends to start their school term with us, and we will be able to show them and also help them with the activities, that we have already done.
In our first circle time, we held hands in a circle and did some different actions. We touched our wrists, touched our knuckles, moved our hips left and right, put our hips in and out of the 
circle, turned around clockwise and anti-clockwise, touched our bodies from the top of our heads to our toes and then we sat down. We spoke about what we say when it is New Year in Japan and we remembered that it is “Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu, kotoshimo yoroshiku onegaishimasu”. Then Shelley asked us a question: “If it is your birthday and I say “Happy New Year”, is this correct?”
Of course we all said: “No”.
Then she said: “If it is New Year and I say “Happy Birthday”, is this correct?”
Again we all said: “No” and we laughed because we thought it was silly to say such a thing. Shelley then opened up a box and said that there were many cards inside the box, but, something on each card was a bit silly. Our task was to look carefully at the cards and when we realized what was silly or wrong, to explain to our friends and teachers what we had seen. You can see a picture of some of the cards here.
There were some cards with really silly things on them. One of them had an airplane with bird’s wings on it; another one had a teapot with the spout upside down. There was a car with someone driving it and inside it was water with fish swimming in the water. We guessed all of the mistakes and enjoyed a good laugh at some of them. We sat together with a really big book for story time. Even thought we had already read this book, we read it differently. Each time we turned a page, we went through the days of the week in order so that we knew what day came next. We also went back to each day and tried to remember the animal that was eating something each day e. g. on Monday, 
the porcupine ate beans, on Tuesday the snake ate spaghetti etc. When we had been through the entire book, we counted seven animals and then we counted how many children were in the class. We counted seven as well. So we each chose an animal from the story and tried to make the sounds of each animal. We created some interesting sounds for each animal. Our teachers were not sure what sound a porcupine made or a pelican or even a fox. The sounds that we created satisfied them a lot.
We now play a game with initial sounds whenever we go and wash our hands and since yesterday, we all recognized the beginning sounds of our names. We are also enjoying lengthier circle times because we can concentrate for longer. Our teachers are presenting us with a lot more challenges each day and we are proving to them that we can do most things and their expectations are spot on.
Shelley is a strong believer in “Teaching to the Top” and we love this aspect to our learning each day.
See you tomorrow for more fun (not in the sun) but still more fun.
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel