Welcome Nana, Luka's grandma and David, his dad

Today some of us worked out all by ourselves, that the day after Thursday is Friday. We then looked through the cards to find the one that started with the letter “F” and we put it on the calendar. Then, as is our ritual each day, we counted all the way up to the number on display, for the date, and we worked out which number came next. We replaced number eight with number nine. Our last task to complete our calendar was to check the weather. We had sunny on display from yesterday and our teachers thought that it was the same today. We were not sure so we went to look out of the window and we came back to tell them that it was also cloudy. They believed us but Liezel confirmed that it was only sunny…..so our trick did not work today! We welcomed Luka back to school today as he was in Hakone with his family and his Nana, from Ireland. She is coming to visit us later today and we are so looking forward to meeting her. Luka, William B and Michaela all did their “Shuji” with Hisami and Hisami held their hands at the very end and wrote their names on the side of the “kanji” for sheep. We are all proud to tell you that if you come into our classroom to see the “Shuji” hanging up, they were all done by us, without help from our teachers. Luka, and William B also decorated their “komma”, spinning tops and made fans.

At our very large activity table, we built houses, schools and other things in our neighbourhood. We told Shelley that there are houses so she suggested that we all build a house while she built Ohana International School. You can see it is taller than our houses because it has four floors. One floor on the bottom for Buds Class; the next one is for Petals Class; the next one is for Flowers Class and right at the top is the office, where Maryna has been sitting this week. We think that she is looking forward to having Christina and Jen back next week as it has been really quiet for her on her own; while we are with our teachers, full of energy and excitement. When we were building our houses we looked for blocks in different colours and sizes that we fitted together. Miyu always told us what shape she was looking for. She looked for small squares many times. Some of our friends, wanted to make transport, however today we wanted to focus just on buildings and next week we will add accessories to our “neighbourhoodscape”.

We will build some more things on Monday and then we will design our own neighbourhood using junk art etc. We would like to ask our families to please collect boxes and other junk art materials as we would like to use these for our cityscape. It may not end up being a cityscape but rather a “neighbourhoodscape”. We remembered that we went to visit the glass studio, the recycling center, the supermarket and the bakery so we need to include these places.

We know that this is the year of the sheep so Hisami sat with us on the mat and we looked at a photograph of a sheep. We noticed that the hair on a sheep is curly and learnt that this is called wool. Sheep are lucky animals because when we went to get their wool, we can just shave them, like our dads shave in the morning. When we are finished shaving them, they can run off and play which is not the same with many other animals. We looked at some wool and tried to think about how we could make a sheep. Hisami had an idea that we wind it round a squished ball of paper. We will do this next week and see how our sheep evolve. We will then look at what other things we need to add to them to make them into sheep.

Now it is the end of our day and we can share with you some photos of Luka’s dad, David and his mum, Luka’s grandma, Nana and their visit to Petals Class. They brought with them a book called “Aliens have underpants”. It was a funny story about Aliens coming to earth to take underpants from washing lines. Sometimes they manage to take them with them back to space but sometimes mums arrive to check the washing, and they run away. Aliens also love to hide inside underpants so David asked us to check our undies to see if there were any aliens hiding in them. Vincent said that he had an alien in his undies! They also sang songs to us; one was Irish and one was Scottish. The one was “My Bonny lies over the ocean” and the other one was a gentle song but we couldn’t understand the words as they were different from English. We then sang our good morning song to them and they joined in and sang their names back to us. We always love welcoming our family members to school when they visit us here in Japan. Thanks David and Collette for coming to us.

We would like to wish you all a happy weekend and we look forward to welcoming our friend Manuel, on Monday.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel