Snow, rain, more snow, then sunshine!
The weather was crazy this morning and made it really tricky for us to do our “Today is…………….” chart. It snowed and then it rained and then it snowed again and then it was a beautiful, sunny day. We sang our songs to help us learn the days of the week and we guessed that it was Wednesday, which was correct. Sometimes when Shelley is singing the names of the days of the week, we join in and it is harder for us to hear the difference in tone and pitch that she is singing. She always gives us easy clues so we can guess the name of the day. We all know how to count to seven now as we do this almost every day. The number seven represents the number of days that there are in one week and we also know that there are seven colours in a rainbow. Today there must have been quite a few rainbows in the sky. This morning we played our fun game called “I wrote a letter”. We all sat in a circle and remembered to keep our hands in our laps; otherwise someone could accidentally stand on them. Each of us had a turn to walk around the circle and drop the letter behind one of our friends and we in turn had a chance to find a letter behind us and chase one of our friends. We always get so excited when we play this game and love it so much. When we were sitting on the mat later in the day, Shelley showed us a number of different facial expressions. She asked us to guess what feeling she had for each one of them. We guessed happy, angry, sleepy and then happy again. We sang “When you’re happy and you know it” and then she asked us what things make us feel happy. We will add our comments to the documentation that is already on the display board for everyone to read.
In these photos one of us has the letter and is walking around the circle thinking about where he can drop it. In the second picture he is drawing on the white board. One of the activities that we did today was work on our art work. 
Today we each made an origami heart and pasted it on the painting and then we did some string art. We used a peg with a piece of string attached to it and dipped it in silver paint. We pulled it along the paper; swirled it around and made interesting patterns on the painting. We are still not finished working on it and will work on it again on Monday morning when we come back to school. It is looking really interesting at the moment. Shelley tried to find her pictures of contemporary art to show us but she searched and searched and couldn’t find them. She will print some out for us to look at next week.
We had a different kind of story today. It was a storyboard story. Shelley had a board and different shaped people and animals and she told the story using them. She told a story about a little boy who was celebrating his birthday and he met a fairy. Together they discovered a baby who was all by himself but luckily the mum came and found him. They all celebrated by sharing his huge birthday cake. Even the cat, pig, lamb and horse ate cake and sang “Happy Birthday”. Next week we will celebrate someone's’s birthday which was in January. He was in Germany at the time but we will still celebrate together with him here in Tokyo at our school.
Darren did Yoga with us and the poses we chose to do today were the bridge, cobra, mouse, candle, shark, tree and do nothing doll. The last one is a funny name and it means that we lie down on a pillow and do special deep breathing and relax our bodies for a few minutes. The other poses require us to move our bodies in sometimes strange positions. We have some pictures of us doing Yoga today. When we do Yoga, we listen to relaxation music and in between each pose; we try to remember how to do deep breathing. We breathe in through our nose, and out through our mouths. We do this a few times.
Sui finished her special card for her family which some of us made yesterday. We are looking forward to seeing some of our friends come back to school next week so that they can make their card too.
We wish everyone a wonderful long weekend and hope that you do something special with your families. Stay warm and safe always
Love Shelley and Darren