Welcome Manuel

Manuel is here and we were so happy to welcome home to our school, to Tokyo and to Japan. He was very happy today and he particularly enjoyed building a car and house with the Lego for our ‘neighbourhoodscape’. He even made his spinning top for New Year and spent time using Poscas decorating the wood and pasting pieces of beautiful origami on it as well. The second thing that he needed to do more urgently than anything else was to complete his placemat so that he could use his own one for snack and lunch time……and he did! We forgot how many things we asked Manuel to do this morning and he was very happy to make them. We completed most of our activities last week however we also wanted him to do the same things so that he too, could learnt about the Japanese New Year. The third and final thing that he did was to make his fan. Phew! Then he went off to the Lego table and continued building with some of us. We continued constructing our neighbourhood and made some more buildings. Many of us, especially the boys in our class, spend time more on their vehicles; building them and moving them around the streets. We will work one more time on the neighbourhood tomorrow and then name the buildings that we want to create etc. During one of our circle times, we sat together on the mat and we spoke about the weather and we organized our calendar for today. We are able to recognize the initial letters of words that are written down as well as the sounds when we are just listening to our teachers and friends in class. Some of us sometimes comment: “Mummy starts with “m” just like Michaela” and our teachers smile. We will soon be doing a little more challenging work in order to increase our vocabulary as well as build more on our literacy and language foundation.

We played a game on the small table during free play which was a matching and memory game. The rules of the game were of course to wait your turn, which for some of us can be a bit challenging; and then when it is our turn, we pick up two circular discs and see if the pictures underneath, match. In order for us to find matching pairs, we need to pay careful attention when our friends are picking up their discs; and then we need to memorise where they picked their discs up from. Some of us just like to participate in the game without paying too much attention to the rules; and then some of us are really serious players.

Taiyo completed decorating his spinning top and tomorrow Mika and Manuel will do their “Shuji” and then we will begin making our sheep. During another of our circle times, Hisami sat down with us and we spoke about this year being the Year of the Sheep. We looked in detail at sheep and saw that they have four legs and “We only have two legs”, said Miyu. Then she said that maybe there is an animal with one, two, three, four, five…….and she continued counting and laughed when she thought about a creature with so many legs. We all felt the balls of wool which felt soft and cuddly. We are not sure if real sheep are soft and cuddly. This project will take a few days as we need to tear and squeeze paper; then wrap wool around the paper and add the details in order for our creations to look like sheep.

We played a fun listening game and we were all able to guess whose voice we were hearing. Shelley took a beautiful piece of Japanese fabric, with small fans and other pictures on it and she hid underneath it. Hisami chose one of us, by touching us gently and we had to say: “Hello Shelley”. Shelley had to listen really carefully and try to recognize, whose voice it was. Then we all had a turn to hide underneath the fabric and wait and listen and guess.

Thanks for a great start to the week and see you tomorrow.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel