Oni masks and Pedestrian crossings
Wednesday January 28th, 2015
Today we spent a lot of time working at the activity tables. We are preparing for “Setsubun” which is a fun festival in Japan. At this time people prepare for the new season by getting rid of the old and bringing in the new. You can read all about ‘Setsubun’ on the board outside our classroom. Today we made “oni” masks out of paper bags. Luckily everyone in Japan loves collecting paper bags; which meant that we had so many in our closet at school, there was a 
huge selection to choose from. We put the bags over our heads and showed Hisami where our eyes were. We touched the part of the bag where our eyes were and Hisami made a mark so that she could cut out two pieces from the paper bag. We chose a mouth, two eyes, ears, hair, a nose, eye brows and pasted them on. We then chose some horns so that we could make our masks look like they were “onis”.
We chose what colour we wanted for the horns and cut out a triangle shape. All of us took great care when we were cutting today and our teachers can see how we concentrate to stay on the line. You can see from the photo of Koh chan with his “oni” mask, that they don’t really look scary. We will chase the “oni” away and bring in good luck next week, when it is ‘Setsubun’.
At the second activity table we spoke about what we do when we want to cross the street.
“Do we run across the street?” Shelley asked.
“No”, we said!
“Where do we cross the street?” Shelley asked us.
“We look for the green light” said Manuel.
“Can we cross the street wherever we want to?” Shelley asked.
“The zebra crossing” said Manuel.
We looked at pictures of zebra crossings and learnt that you can also call them pedestrian crossings. Pedestrians are people who walk in the street. We know that when we want to cross the street, we also need to put our hand up and sing:
“Hands up, hands up, hands up we’re crossing the street”
So we started to make our own pictures with pedestrian crossings. We liked 
the sound of zebra crossing because a zebra has black and white stripes just like a pedestrian crossing, which is a bit more difficult to remember and pronounce.
In order to make our pictures, we needed to cut out strips of white paper which we then pasted onto black paper. Our pictures look like they could become zebras. 
Tomorrow we will talk about what else we need to make e. g. pedestrians, traffic lights maybe and maybe other things.
During circle time, we spoke about the days of the week and the date and of course the weather and then we read a book called “Sheep in a Jeep”. It was a really funny story. We know that this year is the Year of the Sheep but we didn’t know that sheep can drive a jeep. The sheep were not really competent at driving a jeep 
which is what we thought, and they got stuck in the mud and had to call for help. The words rhymed which made it fun to listen to, as well as look at the pictures.
We took our paper bag “oni” to the carpet for one of our circle times. Our teachers want to reinforce our knowledge about our facial features and our bodies, so 
Hisami asked us about all the things that we have on our faces; and did the oni have everything on his/her face. We know that next week we will be celebrating Setsubun and we will be doing some cooking. We will eat “mame” and “ehoumaki”……Yummmmm! We look forward to seeing you all tomorrow which is Shelley’s last day is at school for January; as she leaves tomorrow night.
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel