Magical drawings and rockets going to the moon

When we changed our calendar today, we couldn’t believe that tomorrow will be another month and we are half way through the year. When we are little we don’t notice how quickly time flies, we just enjoy getting bigger, as this is what is important to us; and we enjoy each year passing so that we can celebrate our birthdays. When we get older, we will probably feel differently, just like our teachers and parents do. We are their measure of time flying by too! So tomorrow will be July and this is when there are a lot of changes around us. On Monday, Shelley and Hisami

will not be at school as they go on their summer vacation and we will join our Flowers Class friends for the rest of summer school. It will be fun to be in their class, together with Maki, Nanako and Liezel. Bill will also be

there for next week. Some of us will be going to Flowers Class in the new school year, so it is a good time for us to get used to the environment and our new teachers.

We started off the morning looking at books with pictures of space; we saw planets, stars, moons and black sky. We all took a piece of black paper and a wooden stick and started to draw on the black paper. We wanted to know why we were not using markers or crayons to draw, but soon we knew the answer. When we pushed hard with the wooden stick, we saw sparkly colours appearing, just like the colours in the night sky. We tried to draw stars, planets and moons and loved watching them appear on our piece of paper.

We hung them on our tree which we are going to use for our Tanabata wishes. We covered our hat stand with green paper and made leaves using green tissue paper. Tomorrow we will listen to the story of Tanabata and then we will make wishes on “tanzaku” which is the paper that people write the wishes on. In fact, if you come to Ohana International School from Azabu Juban, when you walk past the lovely bar with antiques in the window, you can see that people have hung their

wishes on the bamboo trees outside the entrance. We will make ours just like those ones.

At the second activity table, we made rockets going to the moon, just like the one that we saw on the computer yesterday. We first looked at our names and counted the number of letters that we have. Then we cut out the same number of blocks from strips of coloured paper. For example, Hana has four letters in her name, so she cut out four squares. Then she looked at her name carefully and on each square, she wrote a letter from

her name. Then she arranged them vertically on her page so that they resembled a rocket and pasted them on the page. She added a large triangle on the top and two small triangles on the bottom. Then she drew the fire and smoke using yellow and orange markers and she added some sparkly yarn. Some of us tore tissue paper and pasted the strips on the sides of our rockets. We thought that it was cool having a rocket with our name on it.

We played a game and sang an action song about rockets flying to the

moon. We counted how many children were in the class today and found out that there were eight. So our song was called “Eight green rockets flying round the moon”. We used one of our circular shaped cushions and put it in the middle of the carpet as if it was the moon. Then we all flew around it singing the song “Eight green rockets flying round the moon x 2 And if one green rocket should try to land too soon There’ll be seven green rockets flying round the moon”. We sang the song until all of us had “landed too soon” and there were “zero green rockets” left. We all tried to calculate how many green rockets were left, every time.

We listened to a beautiful story called “How to catch a star”. A little boy really loved stars and wanted to have one of his own but it was so hard for him to take one out of the sky. After trying so hard and not succeeding, he eventually found a star shape on the beach and he was overjoyed that he could the star treasure home with him. We had a really great day today, even though we missed Liezel because she is teaching with Maki in Flowers Class. Love always Shelley and Hisami