The Little Snowflakes

The great sun is up today! What a radiant Friday! The Buds class friends are ready for a new adventure. Taiga, Yuu and Yurika arrived at school. They all did their morning routines independently. Inside the classroom, we found the map of Tokyo and some of our cars were scattered around.  Taiga and Yuu patiently took one car at a time and lined them up beside the map. Then Goh-san came and started playing with them too. She pretended to be someone who was like a tour guide. She instructed Yuu and Taiga where to take or move their cars around the map of Tokyo. Taiga was overjoyed because it seemed that Goh-san was telling them the places where he also wanted to go to. Lucy, on her second day, brilliantly did her morning routines with little help from her teachers. She is still finding her way with the things that she needed to perform in class like putting away her own water bottle, getting the snacks from her trolley and etc. However, she’s so perfect to be with us and of course, she’s adding more sunshine on a bright wonderful day! Yurika, on the other hand, was busy reaching out and consolidating her friendship with Taiga and Yuu. They posed in front of the camera with big hugs and smiles. On our activity table, Lucy was so engaged in lacing the big beads one by one. She asked her teachers to demonstrate the activity and she later found out that she can also do it herself. She didn’t ask for any help and proceeded threading the beads until the task was completed. Yuu-kun and Taiga continued working on their sun art. They pasted the handprint gently and finalized it by sticking all the handprints around the sun. Goh-san was calmly reading a book for Yurika, Kaia and Lucy. It was Eric Carle’s “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” Yurika almost knows all the animals in the book and Lucy was also delighted by the wonderful pictures she saw. After reading, we went to our activity areas and played with the plastic food and kitchen utensils. Yuu was scribbling and making shapes with the whiteboard markers. Consequently, he proudly showed us his masterpiece. Great job!             Our theme topic for this week is “How’s the weather?” We already learned about sunny, stormy, rainy, cloudy and windy. But we haven’t talked about winter and the snow yet. Thus, our teachers provided the “snowflake paper cut” activity. This was to try how far we can go in terms of cutting and gripping the scissors properly. We actually saw some folded sheets of white copy paper. Here, we noticed that there were some straight and curvy lines and our teachers told us that we needed to cut on the line. And so we did. Ooopppsss…it was a bit challenging for all of us. But it is always good to start somewhere. The gripping part was not really that tedious but cutting straight and exactly on the line was a little arduous. We just needed more practice and we feel that being in Buds class can help us more with what we like to learn. Of course, learning should always be fun! After we have finished cutting, we opened the paper and taaadaaaa…there comes the snowflake! We looked inside the hole and “snap” we had our picture taken.

            In our circle time, we moved our body for our warm-up activities.  We sang the “stop and go” song. We walked with little steps, big steps, fast, slow and so on. It was so comical every time we said the word, “stop!” Some of us would just lose their balance and fell their bottoms on the floor. Lucy was laughing abundantly because of the entertainment that she found in our activity. We all then sat slowly and cooled down for a bit. We asked each other about our names, feelings and the weather. We sang the “Little Snowflake” song and we all loved when our teachers gave us our newly made snowflakes. Lucy, Kaia, Yurika were singing melodiously and they just couldn’t stop singing it. Our friend, Mary the moose came to visit us today again. She talked about “winter” and what she always wears during the cold season. She put on her winter jacket, scarf and a hat.

            We went to the park today!  Yippeee! We’re so exuberant and we had a great time playing in the sand box, running around in the park and going up and down the slide. We hope to see you all again next week and have a great weekend!

Lots of love,

John and Goh