A cool day in Tokyo

It was a cold day today and we spent the entire day inside with our friends and teachers. The park was quite wet from the rains last night and it was a good opportunity to do many different activities in both classes.

Downstairs we have been talking a bit about our feelings and looking at our friends and teachers faces. We can see from their faces how they are feeling. We tried to draw our faces on a white piece of paper, using a black marker. Then we selected a group of faces that had different feelings on them and pasted them onto our paper. We had happy faces, sad faces, grumpy faces, scared faces, surprised faces, thinking faces, sleepy faces, sick faces, and crying faces. We sang one of our good morning songs and tried to make different faces for each language that we said “good morning” in e.g. when we sang “Ohio Gozaimasu” we made a sad face; when we sang “Bonjour” we made a scared face etc.

 At another of our activity tables, we made medals for our Sports Day. We worked really carefully as Shelley used a glue gun that gets really hot so we either gave her the collage materials to paste on or we dropped them onto the glue. One time she said: “Ow” and we knew that she had touched the hot glue by mistake! They are all sparkly and ready for our special day on Monday. We still have to attach the ribbon on it so that we can wear it around our necks at the end of the day.

During the morning we sang ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star”; “There was a farmer had a dog”; “The wheels of the bus”; “ABC song” and our “Hello” song. We spent time playing with the dress up clothes and imaginative play things. We love talking on the phone every day. Tokutaro and Ava sat at the table looking curiously at the worm in the container through a magnifying glass. They watched him walk and they commented that when they looked through the magnifying glass, the worm was so enormous.

Upstairs, FJ spent a long time cutting out pieces of paper at the activity table and she ended up making a picture of herself. She pasted the pieces onto a pink piece of paper and then she used markers and sparkles to make it look really beautiful. All of us did another cutting today as well. We had a piece of paper with many different shapes on it. We used the small shapes and pasted them onto a piece of paper, to make a person. We have been learning all about the different parts of the body and now know their different names and where they belong e.g. our knees join our upper and lower legs together; our elbows join our upper and lower arms together; our neck supports our head and is between our shoulders and our heads etc.

 We had a long discussion about what we can do with our eyes and responded with words like look, play, read, watch television, blink and sleep. Then we took a large purple piece of cloth and laid everyday objects underneath it. Each of us had a turn to put our hands underneath the cloth and feel something. We told our friends how it felt; whether it was hard or soft, long, cold, warm etc. Everyone had to try to guess what it was and each of us were almost always correct. It was quite hard not to use our eyes and look but just use our sense of touch and our memories. The different objects that were underneath the purple cloth were a marble, toy car, paintbrush, scissors, pen and pencil.

In the library, we read the “Animal Sounds” book. Our teachers asked us to close our eyes and they made the sounds of two animals. We had to guess what animals they were. Then each of us had a turn to sit on the chair like the teachers and chose two animals from the book and make their particular sounds. Our friends had to guess what animals we were, while their eyes were closed.

We had a full, fun day at school and look forward to celebrating Lily and Jennifer’s birthdays which are the last ones in September

Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh and Christine