Cool Clodia

We were so glad that all of our friends managed to dress in “hakama” and “kimono” today so we will all have dressed in traditional clothes celebrating this special holiday for children. Even Vincent dressed in “hakama’. We want to say a big thank you to Mayuko and Miyuki (it was so hard to say both of their names as they have similar consonants with different vowels in between them). They spent the entire morning dressing and undressing us and they even spent time studying how to tie the bow on the “hakama” which is quite complicated. Thanks for making us all look so beautiful.

We had our very own “Cool Clodia” arrive at school today. Eat your heart out Claudia Schiffer! Our Clodia was dressed so stylishly and when we went to the park, she took her sunglasses with her.

 Downstairs we had an interesting still life display on the table. There was a piece of pine branch, two pine cones and three small apples. One of the family that comes for after school classes has a beautiful florist in the Juban and they often bring flowers and things from nature, when the children come to their lesson. They told Shelley that the apples are not for eating, but just for display. We had a selection of markers, coloured pencils and wax crayons in browns, greens and reds so that we could try to draw the still life. We made some interesting pictures. We did some long straight lines that represented the branch; we made some swirly circle shapes to represent the apples and we made brown shapes for the pine cones. We will put them into our workbooks and show our parents when they come for the Parent/Teacher conferences on Monday. We played with plasticine and we spent time looking at numbers and playing with the number puzzle. We love playing with the dressing up clothes and accessories and have started incorporating this kind of play together with the toys on our shelves. Now we give our teachers even more challenges as we have been putting pieces from our puzzles inside the handbags. To us this seems quite logical as we are going shopping for fruit. So inside our bags we put the banana, apple, strawberry and orange puzzle pieces! We are lucky that our teachers understand our logic!

Upstairs we used white boards and Miya and Nico enjoyed writing imaginary messages to their friends. They wrote just like big people write using letters of the alphabet.  We really love the kitchen and food and today Noa, Yossi and FJ had dinner together. Yossi sat like a king waiting to be served by his ladies in waiting! Emily and Oliver spent time doing their grasslands pictures and later on they made a flamingo with Jenny as she had been absent from school when the rest of us made them. Miya also wanted to work on her flamingo so she added two pink feathers for its wings. During the morning we did not have use of the library as some of our friends were still dressing up. We did however have time to listen to the story “Lyle, Lyle Crocodile”. When we listened carefully to the title of the story, we realised that the words all rhymed. We know some other rhyming words like cat and hat; big and pig; school and pool; hot and pot. We like playing games with words in class.

We all stood together in a really large circle and sang “Ring a ring of roses”. We used our remote controls and did many different actions. We walked like a giraffe on our tip toes; like an elephant using our arm to make it look like a trunk; swam like a crocodile using fast and slow movements; roared like a lion and sat like a person. Ayaka read from a story called “Shichi Goh San Omedetou”. Tomorrow we will be going for a walk to the shrine in Azabu Juban to complete our festivities for Shichigosan.

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