A new classroom

We saw the sun peeping when we looked out of the window today and hope that tomorrow we will have dry weather and we can go outside and play in the park. We also have a whole lot of flowers to plant in our garden there and are waiting for the weather to improve. We spent a full day with our friends and teachers in one classroom and discovered new things in the room. You may ask why we have discovered new things in a room that we know and are used to. Well, the furniture is in different places and whenever this happens, we see things with new eyes! Now the doll’s house is easily accessible and we can play with it, close to the other toys in the room. One of the shelves has moved to the area near the activity tables and all of our writing tools; scissors; glue etc are on that shelf. When you come to our classroom on the second floor, you will see what we mean. Our teachers continually think about not only what we can make and do but also how to best use the environment that we have to work with. We spent part of the morning playing on the mat and reading books. The story that Darren read to us was all about “Baby Animals”. We know the names of the mummy animals but we were not sure of the babies’ names. We learnt that a baby sheep is a lamb; a baby dog is a puppy; a baby cat is a kitten; a baby hen is a chicken; a baby pig is a piglet. Shoko remembered the word piglet from Winnie the Pooh. Shelley reminded us that there was a little pig in the story of Winnie the Pooh, and the pig’s name is the same as that of a baby pig. Then Shoko started to sing the song ‘Winnie the Pooh’ which she remembered from a DVD.

We sang and did actions to the Wiggles CD; doing our favourite songs and dances. We went to the tables and did finger painting with our fingers and green paint. We looked at our fingers and saw patterns on them and tried to make the same pattern on the paper. We realized that the paint is too thick so our prints were hidden. Tomorrow we will try doing this with stamp pads and then see what our prints look like.

We experimented with the light table using shapes with different coloured cellophane on them. There was a square, circle, rectangle, triangle, pentagon and oval. The colours were red, blue, yellow and pink; we mixed some of the colours and could see what new colour we created. We noticed that when we mixed blue and yellow we made green. On Friday Shoko brought a beautiful little Ohina Sama and Odairi Sama that her mum had made for Hina Matsuri. We didn’t celebrate Hina Matsuri on Friday because Shelley was not at school, so she did it today with us. She feels that it is very important to acknowledge every festival in Japan that we can relate to, together with the many other festivals from around the world. Today we each took a small bowl and looked at the beautiful Hina dolls and then used a spoon to scoop some snack into our very own bowl. When we were finished doing this, we ate the snack which was so delicious. It was white, pink, green and yellow in colour and soft and crunchy. It was a yummy day at school!

Love Shelley, Darren and Kana