Winter School Snow

Well today was the first day of winter school for the children and welcomed back two children we have not seen for a while. Gento who was in England with his family until recently and Tomo has come to us previously for the winter or summer school programs. It was great to see them all so happily enter the classroom and start playing together. Gento headed straight for the toy cars on the road carpet while Shoko helped Tomo do his morning jobs. They looked so cute with Shoko holding Tomo’s hand and showing him where his snack, water bottle, towel and lunch should go. Vincent was very interested in the toy kitchen set and so we moved a table out for him and his friends to sit and they pretended to cook and eat together. Tomo and Shoko then decided that the play-dough on the table look interesting and they made lots of stars together using the cookie cutters. Vincent meanwhile had moved to help Ayaka with decorating the tree. After snack time we saw it was unfortunately raining and so couldn’t head to the park to play but had a great time indoors instead. We went to the library first and read a book all about the New Year and how Santa comes to visit. In the book there were many pictures with lots of snow and snowmen. We then came to the carpet area but when we looked outside there was no snow. We decided that it was okay because we could use some balls of newspaper just like snowballs and have our own throwing competition. We then sat on the floor and closed our eyes…. When we felt something slowly dropping on our heads we quickly looked up to see lots of white Styrofoam pieces dropping on us. It looked just like snow the way it floated down softly. When we came to the table we saw there were lots of art materials waiting for us. When we looked carefully the white paper was in the shape of a snowman but he didn’t have any features such as arms, nose, mouth, buttons or hat on him. We then chose which of the art materials we wanted to use to add a nose, mouth etc to our snowman. There was orange paper, sparkly shapes, little colored circles, black origami as well as glue and scissors. When we had finished decorating the snowmen we were able to put them on our heads and we danced and danced to some of our favorite songs including ‘the monkey song’, ‘hot potato’ and ‘frosty the snowman’. It was a shame we didn’t have any real snow but tomorrow is another new day so maybe it will snow tonight! Stay warm and all the best for the winter holidays. Love always ‘The Ohana Team’.