Welcome back more friends
This week we will be welcoming our friends every day as each day sees someone arriving back from their holidays or someone new starting at our school. We were really happy that we were able to go and play in the park and enjoy time outdoors even though (for our teachers) it is so cold. We had time together with both classes and enjoyed playing with both the older and younger children.
Downstairs, we continued working on our large New Year collage and used gold, red and silver patty pans, red tape, some silver snowflakes and red paint. We will add some beautiful patterned origami to the art work and as always, later on, we will recycle the art work for our birthday wishes. At the second activity table today, we pegged pairs of mittens and socks onto a washing line. Our teachers turned one of our tables upside down and tied the line all around the legs. We were therefore able to work on all four sides of the table, in a similar way to what we do, when the table is turned the right way round. Some 
of the pegs are hard for us to squeeze so our teachers added regular pegs which were much easier for us to squeeze.
We learnt about two special games that are played when it is Japanese New Year. The first one is with “hagoita” and “hane”. In fact, Elisa’s mum, Liz, gave us “hagoita” that have a beautiful lady’s face painted on them, on one side, and some bamboo leaves on the other side. Our teachers showed us how you play 
with them by hitting the ‘hane’ to one another. We will decorate our “hagoita” with paint and origami paper over the next few weeks.
The second game that we played was “fukuwarai”. Fukuwarai (福笑い), or in English, "Lucky Laugh", is a Japanese game played around New Year's ("Oshogatsu"). The game is usually played by children, but adults may sometimes play also. The game is similar to that of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, whereby the players pin different parts of the face (such as the eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth) onto a blank face and laugh at the humorous results.
We read “Polar Bear, Polar Bear what do you see?” and chose this book because it is winter and the weather has been very cold in some parts of the world it has been really cold. Polar bears live where it is really cold and the ground is ice and snow. Marc remembered many of the animals that were on each of the pages.
Upstairs we learnt how to do Japanese Calligraphy with Nanako today. We did this activity one by one as we had to look carefully at the kanji that she had already made and try to copy it with the correct stroke order. We first practiced how to use a “fude” which is the name for the special brush. We used it first just with water on some blotting paper and then we tried it with proper black ink and “hanshi” which is the name for the washi paper, traditionally used for calligraphy. We counted out the number of strokes and copied the kanji for horse which is “uma” in Japanese.
We watered our pots on the balcony and were concerned because we didn’t see any shoots coming out yet.
Our teachers explained to us that it takes a long time for us to grow and get bigger and for most plants, it is the same. We will not be able to see the roots in the planter boxes because they will be hidden inside the soil when they grow. We will only be able to see the parts of our bulbs that grow above the ground.
During circle time, we spoke about some of the things that are a part of 
Japanese New Year, focusing on games that we play and the things that we use when we play them. Besides the things that our friends downstairs learnt about today, we also learnt about a “koma” and how to use it. We decorated them; using Poscas and saw that we needed to use a lot of colour on them, so that the colours show up when the top is spinning. If we use only a little bit of colour, it cannot be seen when they are spinning.
We read “Harold and the purple crayon” during story time.
Love Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine and Maryna