Noah's family visit Ohana
We had eight children in total at school today and had so much fun with Noah’s mum, Nakaba, his sister Anna and his brother, Ian. We welcomed them in our morning circle and they joined in and sang “My name is……………” just like we do every day. They were our three visitors today and after we had counted them, we counted our classmates of which 
there were six. So where were the eight, you may ask yourself? Well Tokutaro and Sophie arrived and made up the extra two children. We were delighted to have more friends and spend the morning together doing many things. Ian and Anna read Noah’s favourite book called “Little Daruma and Little Tengu”. It had such beautiful illustrations in it. Little Daruma wants to have a fan and a hat just like Little Tengu. But this is not enough for him. He wants everything that Little Tengu has, even his long nose. This is when it becomes too much for Little Daruma’s dad. After they read the story, we went to the tables to do activities that they had prepared for us. They made “kabuto” which are helmets, a symbol for “Boys Day” or “Kodomo no hi”. They made them using newspaper. We had stickers and markers to decorate them with.
We loved peeling the stickers off and they look so beautiful. Then we had a special jumping thing that we could 
decorate with markers however we were so curious about them jumping, we couldn’t concentrate on anything else. We bent them backwards and waited for them to jump. Each time our little bodies jumped too. We want to say a huge thank you to them for spending time with us today and for always doing such fun things with us.
Today we did a practice day for our Earth Day collection. Earth Day was on Sunday 22nd April and we had planned to do it on Monday 23rd April, but unfortunately it was raining that day. In the meantime, the people from the Azabu Juban community centre dropped off gloves and tongs for us to use. So today was our day to practice. We walked to the park behind one of the large apartment buildings on the big street and found a few bits of garbage. Fortunately or unfortunately, all the outdoor areas are cleaned in the mornings so must of the garbage had already been collected by the time we arrived 
there. We managed to pick up many cigarette butts; paper; plastic containers; tissues and other things. We were so excited to see a small park there with some playground equipment so of course, we hurriedly completed the garbage collection and then raced to the park. We discovered a very high slide; swings and a rocking horse. The slide was the most popular piece of equipment and we enjoyed climbing the stairs and then going down. It was quite intimidating at first as it is really steep and has some bumps on it, which were purposely built into it. We all learned to wait until the person in front of us had moved away from the bottom of the slide, before we slid down.
We had a great day and look forward to cooking tomorrow…..Shirashizushi! Yumm!
Love Shelley, Darren, Sabine, and Kana