New Year Calligraphy
New Year Calligraphy Today we immediately noticed when we came into the room on the 3rd floor the long sheets of white rice paper, black ink and large pointy brushes. After doing our morning jobs and playing with the Lego and dinosaurs for a while we all went to the table to see what the paper, ink and brushes activity was all about. We were very lucky to see Kana show us the Chinese kanji characters for ‘dragon’ and ‘Happy new Year’. She used the brush and the black ink and carefully drew the characters on the paper nice and big. We then took it in turns to have a go at tracing the dragon kanji and then without any help at all from Darren or Kana we drew Happy New year on a separate sheet of paper. It was so much fun and then we helped Darren fold over the top of the paper onto some long bamboo so we can hang them up on the wall. They look great and we are so proud of them!! Gento on the 2nd floor meanwhile was trying out a new toy which involved placing colored shapes on pegs. He is getting better at matching colors and shapes. He was very careful to take the shapes one at a time and place them on the upright pegs. Eva enjoyed looking after the baby doll and decided she wanted to look after it in free play time. She was very funny and made sure she supported the dolls head. The main attractions today were the books. They looked after them so carefully and although they are unable to read them yet, they still will pick them up and turn the pages as if reading, so cute!! We all sat down to have snack together on the 3rd floor and we had a quick discussion about the animals in the Chinese New Year book that Noah’s mother read to us last week. We were able to remember nearly all of them including the rabbit, tiger, cow, snake, horse, dog, monkey and pig. In circle time we went into the library first to look at a few pictures of Chinese dragons. They looked a bit scary and when we looked at the nature books on display we noticed how some animals have the same body parts as dragons, for example bats wings look like, lions claws look like dragon claws, shark teeth etc. We then sang a new song about dragons titled ‘Five Green Dragons’ which we used to count down from 5 to 1. Afterwards we went to the table to make cards for Sophie’s birthday party on Friday morning. We had lots of paper hearts and we then used sparkly pens, markers and stickers to decorate them for Sophie. The park was cold but fun. We spent a lot of time on the slide today and we had sometimes 4 or 5 of us climbing it together. It is always so much fun to play with our friends on both the 2nd and 3rd floor together. We tried holding hands and climbing up the sandy slope too!! But this was a bit tricky. Have a great afternoon, Darren, Kana, Goh and Marie