It's raining it's pouring the old man is snoring

A rainy day means time to stay indoors and have more quality time with our friends and teachers! It was lovely for us to meet Miya’s grandma and grandpa this morning. We have been fortunate to meet many of our Ohana friends’ grandparents and it is always good to see them when they visit Tokyo. Our teachers always tell us that Tokyo is all of our home, at the moment. Some of us will stay here for a short time; some of us for a long time and some of us for a long, long time. Many of us are fortunate to have grandparents that can and still want to travel and we think that they like to see us and our school friends and teachers. We love waking up with them in the morning!

Downstairs, we completed all of our hearts for Ava’s birthday, laminated them and they are all ready to be joined together in a heart chain. Walker had his last day with us at school and we had a lovely time with his mum when she came to school and brought us cupcakes and “pao de queijo” for snack time. They are little cheese rolls and are so yummy. We had time to say some special things to Walker e.g. that we love him and will miss him and we also had time to say that we hope that he is happy in his new school in India and thinks of us some times.

 We spent time singing and dancing with the musical instruments and today our special song that we sang was “The Wheels on the Bus”. We sang so many verses that included the babies, grandpas, grandmas, dads, mums, driver, children, wipers, bell, horn etc. We were sitting on the floor and our teachers were standing up so we were looking up at them and singing the song. We stopped playing our musical instruments while we were singing as sometimes it is not so easy for us to do two things at the same time.

We looked through our telescopes and saw one another as well as many things that are in our classroom. We made our bodies look just like a table which is a yoga pose. We lifted our bottoms off the ground and balanced on our hands and feet. We read many books today while lying on the cushions and always ask for the same ones to be read to us. Even though we were not sure exactly what the words meant, we asked Shelley to read the “daruma” book to us over and over again.

Upstairs we did Yoga and we all had a chance to select a pose for our friends and teachers to do. Emily selected the mouse and Noa made herself into the perfect mouse posture. Some of the other poses that we did were the turtle, frog, bug, peacock, dog, lion and butterfly.

 Because we had to stay indoors today, our teachers took out the cubes and balls and we played a game where they asked us to find a ball that matched the colour of a food e.g. tomato and our job was to pick up all of the red balls; eggplant and our job was to pick up all of the purple balls. We put the balls into one of the cubes so we had cubes that had only one colour inside them.

At the junk art table, Fj and Noa each made a horse using a pet bottle, 4 pieces of wood, a cardboard tube and coloured matchsticks. FJ painted her horse pink while Noa made hers black. Sophie made a chicken using 2 CD’s, 2 lollipop sticks, some wiggly eyes and lots of pink feathers.

We were lucky to have cupcakes and cheese bread for our snack as well and loved them both. We all posed together for a group photo as it is Nick’s last day for real. We will miss him very much and hope that he finds a great school and meets wonderful friends in India.

During our circle time, we were introduced to the letters “c” and ‘k”. You may be wondering why we were introduced to these letters at the same time especially since they do not follow after one another in the order of the alphabet. Well, they both mostly have the same sound in words; and they very often go together at the end of a word e.g. clock, kick etc. The “c” sometimes has a “s” sound in words too. We sang the song “We are clicking castanets c, c, c” which is the song that goes with this sound. We noticed many things that start with this sound e.g. castle, car, cage, clock, cat, kittens, kite etc. During our circle time, Ayaka told us that different sounds that animals make in Japanese e. g. woof in English is “wong” in Japanese and meow in English is “nya” in Japanese.

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