Sharks and sea creatures impression

♪Five little sharks swimming in the sea,

One bumped into a giant manatee…♪

The typhoon is bringing us some strange weather to Tokyo. We were not able to play outside but we had another busy day. On our last day of the week of ‘Under the Sea,’ we made floating sea turtles. We watched Nemo and tasted the ‘sea’ for dessert:)

Luka and Miyu who were the first ones to arrive to school started the day making each a sea turtle out of a pet bottle and a piece of kitchen sponge. Last week when we made pet bottle wind spirals with Maki, we had cut out and kept the bottom parts of the pet bottles so that we could use them as turtle shells. We first used Poska markers to colour and decorate the shell. Some of us liked to colour the inside and some liked to colour the outside or both. The next step was a little bit tricky but with the help of teachers we were able to do it. We chose a turtle shaped sponge from the choices of pink, green and yellow and then we chose a piece of yarn to sew the body and the shell. The teachers helped thread the yarn through a plastic needle and we used our fingers to pull out the needle so that the yarn went over the shell from one end to the other end, repeating this over and over again. We each chose a button to attach it at the top of the shell to tighten the yarn. Jeremy and Jessica both chose elegant shiny buttons. Jeremy usually likes to pick green for everything but today, he insisted that he would chose the pink yarn because he was sure that his mother will like it that way. Arata liked to use a silver flower seeing that Hana choose a pretty white and yellow flower. Lena and Riko liked pink buttons. Kenichi, Ami and Miyu liked purple buttons. On the small table, Ami wanted to make a necklace and from time to time, she came up to the teachers for help saying, “My necklace keeps tangling.” Soon after, the others girls wanted to join Ami at the small table to draw mermaids and cutting out papers. Ami was also interested in the tray of blue sparkly salt. She liked digging her hands in the salt and lifting her hands up in the air she said, “Look my hands are blue!”

After snack time, we did some counting. We counted the numbers of girls and boys. There were six girls and five boys. When the teachers asked “Are there more girls or boys?” some of us were not sure. So we used coloured animals to help us understand that six is more than five. Then Nanako read us a story called Smiley Shark. This book was about a friendly shark who just wanted to make friends by showing his big smile to the Angelfish, puffer, Starfish, Octopus, Jellyfish and Catfish but no one wanted to get close to him in fear that he might eat them up. The Shark was feeling lonely and realised that his smile was only scaring off his friends when one day his friends were in trouble, caught in a fisherman’s net. He used his smile to now scare off the fisherman who drops the net down and he saved his friends. After all, they all made friends!

Instead of moving our bodies outdoor we decided to move our bodies indoors! We played musical chairs along a fun song called “A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.” Even though the purpose of this game is to get a seat as fast as you can, Riko was very sweet and demonstrated to all of us how to help out our friends – seeing Taiyo who needed more time to find a place to sit, Riko waited for him to find a spot before she took her seat. It was Jeremy won the last seat and he was indeed very proud of himself J Well done Jeremy and well done everyone! For our next game, we played Stop and Go, an activity we did last week only this time we became rabbits, robots and snakes. Our last game was Guess What I am?   This is another activity Nanako likes to do in her Ballet class: one by one, we come up in front of everyone and choose which sea creature to become and the audience has to guess what it is. Our friends had great ideas and expressed themselves well. Lena was a sea snake; Riko was an angel fish; Arata was a shark; Kenichi and Hana were octopuses; Jeremy was a seahorse.

After doing some exercise it was about time to relax and have fun and our teachers had just the right thing to do – we watched some parts from the film, NEMO! Since we talked about sharks and sang “Five Little Fish,” we watched the part where Dory and Marlin meets Bruce the shark. Some of the friends were a bit scared of this scene but once we moved on to the scene where Marlin and Dory escapes through a crowd of jellyfish and finds their way to Crush the sea turtle and his gangs, we all enjoyed meeting all the different kind of sea creatures. What more, after we finished our lunch, we ate our Jello-O aquarium that we had made on Wednesday! What a way to end our week! Yummy yum yum ;)

It was the last day for Taiyo and Miyu today. We hope they have a wonderful summer vacation and we are looking forward to seeing them back in August! Please have a great afternoon and enjoy the weekend!

All our love, Maki, Liezel and Nanako