It's raining it's pouring

It was a cold and rainy day in Tokyo today and for all of our friends who are still sick, we wanted to wish you well and say to you that the best place today was to be at home; all cuddled with something warm to drink and time to play and relax.

Outside the rain came down so hard during the morning; we could even hear it through the closed windows…..brrrrrrr! Downstairs we had three friends today and because on a Tuesday we do not have too many children coming to class, we like to get together with our older friends upstairs and we did.

We first played downstairs and did some table activities. Ava did her black and orange collage and in fact she drew the leaves that she had seen when she was away in the countryside on the weekend. They were orange. She pasted some collage materials onto her page when she had completed her drawing. Then we all sat together at the table with stamps. We had so many beautiful stamps with animals and things from nature on them. They have a 3D shape on top which is where we had to hold them. We took off the transparent cap on the bottom and stamped the shapes onto our page. We also had some painting set up but we were so busy that we didn’t have time to do it. We will do it tomorrow when we come to school.

 We took out the musical instruments and started to play them while singing and dancing. We gave specific ones to our teachers too so that they could play with us. We danced to the Wiggles CD and did the actions to many of the songs. The one was all about moving our body; we ran; we walked; we jumped and we lay on the floor and slept. We always shout “wake up” when we think we need to get up!

We looked at our Life Books and we love seeing photos of when we were babies as well as seeing our family members who live far away.

Then we went upstairs and spent until the end of lunch time with our friends and teachers there. We met a new girl called Sophia who will be joining Ohana in January. She will be in the classroom upstairs and she really enjoyed her time with us. We showed her the things that we can play with and we also told her which things are only for adults to touch. We look forward to welcoming her back to Ohana after the New Year. Upstairs we had so many activities to do as well. We sat together in the library and read the book called “Oliver’s vegetables”. We said the names of the vegetables in both English and Japanese. We remembered some of the words as we learnt them last week. Potato is jagaymo; carrot is ninjin; beans are mame; and tomato is tomato!

 Darren’s wife Yuko came to school today and she too enjoyed listening to the story, doing activities, singing and playing games. When we came back into the classroom we noticed that there were two easels with newspaper on them, newspaper on the floor and newspaper on the table. There were different coloured paints too and our art smocks. Our task today was to paint a farm scene on a large piece of paper. We thought about our Ohana farm with the 3D animals and fences that we made and some of us painted amazing pictures. Our friends from downstairs also joined in with this painting activity and painted whatever they wanted to. Another painting activity that we did today was with small sweet potatoes. We dipped them into purple paint and then stamped them on our pictures with the vines and leaves that we made yesterday. They really came out beautifully and we love getting our hands full of paint so…………………our teachers joined four pieces of paper together and we did finger prints, hand prints, rolled balls in the paint and then rolled them onto the paper etc. We ended up making a large purple work of art.

It was such a big job to clean the paint area up and throw all of the newspaper away. Then we all sat together and held hands and sang “A ring a ring of roses” and we played a game where we had to touch different parts of our body but not copy Darren as he made mistakes on purpose. He does this to trick us and we have to be “on our toes” when we play this game with him.

Later in the day we learnt the lower case letter ‘a’. Many of us know that ‘a’ is for apple, alligator and ant.

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