Tanabata
The rain poured down for the entire day at school tomorrow and we were very happy, because we had so many things to do in our classroom, for our theme Stars and Moon. Our teachers always let all of us do the activities that they have prepared, even if we were not at school on the day, that they were originally planned for. So today Miyu made her rocket with the letters of her name on it and Koh joined her because he wanted to make another one. Tomorrow Ami will make hers and on Friday, Luka will make his. Just as Koh and Miyu sat down at the table, they
looked at the wall and saw giant posters of the moon, stars and space. They were curious and took the magnifying glasses and looked at the pictures. They saw the moon’s surface and how bumpy it is; they saw some tiny twinkling stars in the sky and they could also see the Milky Way. We learnt a little about the Milky Way in relation to our story about the festival called “Tanabata” which is celebrated in Japan next week, on
the 7th July.
Hisami read the story of Orihime and Hikoboshi. We were sad to know that they could not be together for a whole year and that they could only meet on the 7th July; if the skies were clear. In the story, birds were really kind to them, and made a bridge in the sky for Orihime to walk towards Hikoboshi so that they could be together, when it was raining. The bridge is the symbol of the Milky Way. We looked at a picture of the Milky Way and it looked like a spiral with many
stars in it. It also looked white and golden. We hope that on Tuesday next week, the sky is clear so that they can be together again.
Our pretend bamboo tree, received an addition today. Nanako brought us a real bamboo branch so we attached it to our tree and now it looks like we have an authentic decoration in our classroom. We started off by making lanterns to hang on the tree. We had a few options for our
lanterns. For one of them we cut along lines but not all the way to the
end of the paper. When we opened the paper up, we saw a beautiful lantern shape which we hung on the bamboo branches. For the second kind of lantern we cut strips of shiny origami paper and attached them to a strip of white paper. Then we took the white paper and made it into a loop and our shiny strips hung down like lanterns.
After snack time, we listened to the kamishibai story of Tanabata.
Hisami held up the pictures and read the words at the back. She read them in Japanese and English so all of us could understand. In the story they mentioned “tanzaku” and we saw a picture of them hanging from a bamboo tree. Bamboo trees are very strong and are green, that’s why we hang our wishes on these trees, specifically. Our teachers thought that maybe because bamboo trees grow really tall, when we hang our wishes on the branches, they can get to the heavens quicker and our wishes can come true. We love our tree in our classroom.
Today we changed the month on our calendar to July. We noticed that there are three months that start with the ‘j’ sound viz. January, June and July. We looked at the months and tried to work out which ‘j’ was July. Sofie was the weather person today and she pointed to the calendar and we read it with her. We had to also change the weather to rainy as we had cloudy and sunny from yesterday. Hisami played the small portable piano that we have in our classroom and she sang the
“Tanabata” song to us.
We built a fabulous train track (our teachers did) and we will leave it up for the rest of the week, to play with. We have been enjoying playing with the trains and are expressing our thoughts and feelings openly with our friends. Thanks for another wonderful day learning about the night sky and the beautiful but sad story, “Tanabata”.
Love always Shelley and Hisami