We love our new blanket
Thursday, February 19th, 2015
Today we had a regular school day and tomorrow we will continue International Month with Vincent and Miyu’s mums. Mika and Michaela completed their dragon pictures for Chinese New Year and spent a long time drawing and doing collage on their pictures. They used red and gold for their 
drawings as well as red and gold collage materials. These drawings are going straight into our workbooks/portfolios which are getting so full.
At the second activity table, Hisami sat with us and we looked at pictures of “Obina” which means Emperor and “Mebina” which means Empress, as it is soon going to be ‘Hina Matsuri’. During this festival people display many beautiful Hina dolls on steps. We are just going to make two dolls viz. Obina and Mebina. We 
started off by covering a tissue box with red paper and this is going to be our step. We used tape and folded the edges so that the entire box was covered. Then we set about choosing the materials that we wanted to use for our Obina and Mebina. We had a selection of toilet rolls and paper plates together with beautiful origami paper, markers and other collage materials. We chose different 
colours for the clothes for Obina and Mebina. People often call the Emperor, Ohinasama and the Empress, Odairisama however these names are used one of the Hina Matsuri songs and people think that they are the names of the dolls.
You can see from these pictures that we used part of a paddle pop stick for the Obina’s “shaku” which is a ritual baton that he holds.
The Mebina holds a fan which we used when we cut a cupcake holder. We drew their faces and then pasted on their special headdresses. We will continue to make them tomorrow and next week so that all of us have the opportunity to make them in readiness for Hina Matsuri which is on 3rd March.
This morning when we arrived at school, we noticed that there was a new blanket in the dress up corner. It looked like a jigsaw puzzle and we loved it. 
We touched it and tried to see how we could remove the pieces to do the puzzle but we couldn’t. Shelley told us that she arrived home yesterday and there was a present for her that came from Canada. It was from her dearest, special friend Jill. She had started knitting the blanket when they were together last summer. Shelley said that 
she would love the blanket for the dress up corner, to cover our dolls when they are sleeping…..and then the gift arrived. We called Jill to say thank you and she was so happy that we loved it.
After we had completed our roll this morning and rearranged the calendar, we looked at a book with pictures and words in it. We know that there are many words in the world that 
all mean the same thing, but they are spoken in different languages. We looked at the book and selected some objects or animals and we tried to say them in different languages e. g. car in English, kuruma in Japanese, coche in Spanish, voiture in French, motor in Afrikaans, mechonit in Hebrew, kotse in Tagalog and qiche in Chinese. We had lots of fun trying to work out the words in the languages that we knew. Manuel helped us with Spanish, William 
helped us with French and Chinese, Liezel helped with Tagalog and Shelley helped us with Hebrew and Afrikaans. We sang one of our good morning songs where we say “good morning” in many different languages. We also learnt how to sing “Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar”. Each of us has a turn to say ‘who me’ and our friends say together ‘yes you’ and then we say ‘couldn’t be’ and together our friends say ‘then who?’ and we chose a friend or teacher to have their turn. The last person is the one who stole the 
cookies…..oh oh!
We used our name cards and photos again when we were in the middle of doing something and had to go to work at the activity tables. Our teachers are really proud of us for respecting our friends. Today, Michaela sat and waited for Koh to complete his activity as she wanted to play with his things, but she wanted to play with him as well. She was so patient and chatted while he was working and then they went off together and had fun.
Thanks for a wonderful day with lovely sunshine so we could go and play in the park. We look forward to welcoming Mayuko and Asako san tomorrow to teach us something about Japan.
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel