Celebrating Culture Day in Japan
Today was really quiet in the park as it is a National Holiday in Japan. It is called Culture Day and Nakaba, Noah’s mum, came to school to help us celebrate and enjoy some of the things that people do on Culture Day. She told us that in 
Japan, it is partly a celebration of Art and Music and so she brought along a wonderful art activity for us to do. The activity was making finger puppets.
We had a selection of materials to use. We had coloured wooden spatulas; faces in different skin tones; googly eyes; mouth; tiny pom poms; hair and buttons. We decorated our faces and added all the facial features to them. Then we put hair on our puppets heads and last but not least, we pated buttons onto the colourful stick. We will use our puppets to tell stories to our friends and teachers or just play with them. A big thank you to Nakaba for always coming to school to do something special with us! We are looking forward to our cooking activity and also celebrating Noah’s party with you on the 30th November.
We missed Oliver and Eva today and hope that they are both feeling better.
We sang our “Hello” song with all of our friends upstairs when we went to do the activity with them. We are slowly but surely saying all or parts of the words to the song. Tokutaro and Gento came downstairs after snack time and we played the flower game upstairs. We had to move to the music and when the music stopped, we had to find another flower and tell our friends what colour it was. We laugh a lot when we play these games. We love the story called “In Wibbly’s garden” and
we helped Darren read the story today. He read a sentence and then we would fill in the missing word. Some of the words we filled in were bean, ladybird, beetle, snail, castle etc. We did a second activity using paper tape and leaves 
that we had collected in the park. We chose a colour for the tape and cut it out so that it was the right size to fit on a sheet of laminating paper. We added leaves to the picture and then fed the laminating sheet into the machine. We watched it go in one side and come out of the other side.
In the park we played with balls and threw them into the cones. The cones were like a basket ball hoop on the ground; and we also did zig zag racing.
Downstairs we played with paper clay and a paddle pop stick. The clay is a completely new texture for us and we were not sure what to do with it. We pulled it and broke it into small pieces and we also poked the stick into it and saw that it made lines on the clay. It was quite difficult for us to squeeze it as we are so used to playing with play dough which is really soft and pliable.
We did music and exercises to one of the Wiggles CD’s. We shook all of our sillies out, jumped our jiggles out, clapped
our clickers, nodded our noddies out and wiggled our woggles away. We read the alphabet book together and Gento started naming some of the items. Tokutaro then copied him and said the words as well.
We are learning about what happens to nature during Autumn/Fall and will be doing many activities around this theme in the coming month. Thanks for a great day and once again, a big thank you to Nakaba for her activity today.
Love Shelley, Darren and Kanako