Warm and cosy classrooms

It was soooooooo cold outside when we went to the park and we still had fun running around and sitting on the swing with our teachers and our friends. We were all warm in our coats and jackets and it was good to get outside however we were all so happy to be back inside our warm classrooms. We think that our teachers were even happier to be inside! Upstairs, we had fun interacting with one another while discussing our favourite trains during free play time. We love the train set, especially since the trains move like real trains on a train track. We spent a long time playing here and then went to the tables to do some activities. We used “Scratch Art” sheets of paper to work on. When you use this paper, it is like magic because the paper is black and you use a stick, not a crayon or marker. You draw with the stick on the black paper and as you draw, you see the most beautiful colours appearing. This is the magical part of “Scratch Art”. Today, we had an outline of a Christmas tree and we scratched inside the shape of the tree. We then stuck on sparkles,shapes and pom poms. They look like beautiful trees now; just like our trees that some of us have in our houses, in preparation for Christmas.

We read our Christmas rhyme book and are really enjoying listening to and making rhymes. We were able to think of some of the words and fill in the missing rhyming ones at the end of the sentence. We sang the second line of Jingle Bells and when we were in the park, we looked at the area where we will be planting flowers tomorrow. Minato-ku has given us a space in the park so that we can plant flowers and take care of them for the next few months. They sent us shovels and equipment for gardening and this will be something special for us to do outside of our actual classrooms; and in the community. We will tend to our flowers whenever we go to the park and make sure that they are thriving.

Downstairs, we did drawings for Finn’s book as some of us were not at school yesterday. This took a while as we drew with markers and crayons and then we pasted some tissue paper on top of our pictures. We spent time building with the Duplo blocks and animals. We incorporated food in our play and fed the animals carrots and other vegetables. We first put the animals on a train, then built a house and then fed them. We had a wonderful time doing movements to music and whenever Shelley puts the Wiggles CD on; we go to the shelf and take out musical instruments. We love doing music and playing instruments at the same time. In some of the songs we need to use both of our hands, so we put our instruments down and clap or tap or hammer with our fists.

We sat in a circle and sang “Everybody clapping” and then we said good morning in English, Japanese, French and German. We counted five fingers on one of our hands and then we sang “5 little candles”. We are going to be doing Channukah on Friday and on Channukah, you light one candle every night for eight nights. One of the candles lights all of the other candles each night. It is called the Shamash. We will sing some more songs related to Channukah tomorrow in preparation for Friday. Today we also sang “Where is Thumbkin” and “Open them, shut them”.

Love Shelley, Darren, Sabine and Kanako