Pilot and flight attendant

It was a cold and rainy day outside and we spent the day indoors, playing, being creative and learning with our friends and teachers. Sabine came back from Europe last year and she made a surprise visit to school. We were so happy to see her after a very long time. Okaerinasai Sabine!

Downstairs we are doing a lot of singing lately; some old songs and some new ones too. We love singing and dancing and moving our bodies and are spending time each day, walking around the table when we go shopping and finding new places in our classroom to play and hide. We especially like hiding at the moment and go under the table, behind the cushions and also if there is a box around we like to use it for something.

Today we couldn’t find the box that we had used yesterday because our teachers had wrapped one of our canvasses in the paper to mail to one of the people who bought it. When we go shopping we take our hand bags, mobile phone and now we have money (the left over raffle tickets from our Wine Tasting). We also use the fruit and vegetable cards together with the pictures on the alphabet chart and the plastic food. Our teachers sing “And we’ll go walking down the street, shopping for things to eat”. We always have to pay for the food that we buy and use paper money for this. At the activity tables we used play dough with rollers and laminated Autumn leaves. It was interesting to just use the rollers and leaves today and we used the leaves creatively. We did some cutting along short black lines on strips of paper and we did drawings. Our teachers finished making birthday hearts for Ayaka so we are almost ready for her party on Friday.

During our circle time, we sang our “Hello” song and we played a game called “Fukuwarai”. We started off looking at two faces on the door of the office; one had facial features on it and the other didn’t. We sang a song, and then put our hands on certain features and then we had turns to point to the one face and show everyone where the man’s eyes, nose and mouth were. Our job was to place one of the facial features on the blank face, while we were blindfolded. This was a little difficult as we could not see where the face was. We had to use our hands and feel where it was. Some of us pasted the different features in strange places e.g. the mouth on his head, an eye on his chin etc.

Upstairs we read a book called “I like trains”. This was a good way for us to learn some new vocabulary e.g. carriage and we did a counting activity related to this. We sang “She’ll be coming round the mountain” and we all blew our whistles like a train and stayed in a line just like the carriages of a train. Then we lined the chairs up to resemble the inside of an airplane and we sang the airplane song “Hear the airplane” and we put our arms out to make the wings. FJ volunteered to be the pilot and Miya was the flight attendant. Miya walked carefully down the aisle holding a tray and giving out plates with imaginary food on them.

Our airplane was then transformed into a bus and we sang “The wheels of the bus”. We had so much fun as you can see from the photos. We moved the chairs into another formation and played musical chairs.

In our circle we played a game where our teachers wrote a number on the whiteboard and we had to count out the same number of animals. Ayaka then introduced us to the Japanese number symbols from numbers one to five. They are very different from the number we see on a regular clock and they have a certain way that we have to make the lines.

We reviewed the letters ‘c’ and ‘k’ which have the same sound but look different. Later on we will learn that the ‘c’ sometimes makes the same sound as an ‘s’ e.g. circus, circle etc. We looked at flashcards with pictures of things that start with a ‘c’ or a ‘k’ and tried to identify the pictures. Miya and Jennifer decorated Emily’s birthday crown as we are celebrating her birthday this week as well. Nico and Margo worked on their spinning tops using markers and they also tried to spin them with the string.

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