And the rain came down

We read a story called “The Rain Came Down” which was about a day in the life of people and animals living in the city, when the rain came down. It was fun to read a story about a rainy day, since we had a rainy day too, here in Tokyo. In the story, people seemed to be grumpy and rushed and troubled because of the rain, however we were not this way at all today. When the rain stopped and the sun and a rainbow came out, in the story, people’s dispositions changed. They seemed to be a lot happier and kinder to one another. We are not sure why the weather makes people feel a certain way. During the story we sang a few songs about rain e. g. “Rain, rain go away”; “It’s raining it’s pouring” and when we read the story we all tried to repeat the sentence “and the rain came down” when it was on the page. It was repeated many times.

We did a few different activities inbetween our free play time this morning. We worked on our large group art work that we started last week. It is our cherry blossom tree display made entirely from paper that we have pinched, torn and sqeezed. Today in order to make the cherry blossoms, we tore pieces of pink tissue paper, squeezed them into balls and then pasted them onto the branches of the trees and in other places too. Some of us did very well and were particularly careful when we squeezed the tissue paper, making sure that we had squeezed it into tiny weeny little balls. Since it is a work in progress, we are not sure what we will be doing on it tomorrow……let’s wait and see!

We continued working on our Mother’s Day cards and started learning how to weave. We used a piece of metal with squares in it. We tried to thread the pieces of thread over and under the wire; in one square and out the other one. Weaving seems to be a wonderful art and we will persevere in order to see what the entire frame looks like when we have used up all of the thread.

During the morning we all sat together and Hisami sang the tulip song using a red, yellow and white tulip, similar to the ones we made a few weeks ago. We sang the “Tulip song” in Japanese and then the caterpillar one. We love learning things with props as this helps us have an image in mind which then, assists with us remembering things. We also took some faces, arms, legs and clothes and put them together to make ladies on our white board. We have learnt a lot about our bodies in the past and this is helping reinforce everything.

We started using our new natural musical instruments that come from Australia. They are all made from wood and seed pods and animal skins. Some of the wood has beautiful Aboriginal dot paintings on it. Many of the instruments are for shaking and there were some that you scrape and twist. We combined using these instruments together with our other ones that some one us actually prefer. The final thing that we did today was go down to the MPR and play in the ball pool, build at the Lego table and have fun moving our bodies a lot.

Marc and Sophie were very interested in doing some painting this morning as they were not at school on the day when we learnt about ‘symmetry’ last week. Marc made a butterfly while Sophie made flowers. Arata cut out his butterfly that he made last week and then he added some stickers to the butterfly’s wings. We chatted about Easter and what we did on the weekend. In other countries many people have a four day weekend, celebrating Easter in different ways. The way that we know best is to eat chocolate Easter eggs and rabbits made from chocolate too.

These are some of the things that we did on our weekend:

Tokutaro: We had Easter eggs and stickers

Beckett: I saw some baskets everywhere. I was so surprised. There were lots of toys and then we had a party and found the eggs. But first I dyed the eggs and put stickers on

Ava: That’s what I did

Clodia: I found egg with my friends

Ava: I put shrink wraps on the eggs with the hairdryer. They were red eggs

Olivia: We just looked for eggs and did an Easter party

Allie: I found chocolate eggs

Tokutaro: I found my home a strawberry cake Easter egg. I eat the ice cream egg

Marc; I found one, two, three. I found four eggs

Jeremy: I have a picnic. I go to Mister Eggs and I eat a lot

Sofie: I forgot

 We went to the MPR and Olivia and Sofie practiced climbing on the climbing wall while Marc collected balls and hid them underneath his shirt. In the library, Nanako showed us a book called “Seasons” which had some pictures of ducklings in it. She then asked us if we knew some other baby animal names e. g. cat – kitten, hen – chicken etc. She then read us another book titled “Peter’s Chair” about a little boy whose dad painted his old furniture from when he was baby. His dad painted everything pink because his mum was going to have a baby girl. He was not very happy about this so he took his chair away. Eventually he returned it and he helped paint it pink for the arrival of his baby sister.

We looked at several shapes this morning e. g. circle, triangle, square, rectangle, parallelogram and cloud which were all made from origami paper. We tried to fold the shapes to see if they were symmetrical or not. We tried to follow the lines that our teachers had drawn on the back, to help guide us where to fold the paper. We noticed that some of the shapes were symmetrical and some were not. We then practiced tearing paper to make branches for our

cherry blossom trees. It looks like our trees have grown a lot since we first started working on them, because they now have more branches on them.

Talking about things growing, when we looked on the balcony downstairs, this morning, we saw that some of our bulbs had grown a lot. One of them has almost become a flower and it is red. We are looking forward to seeing all of our bulbs becoming beautiful tulip flowers soon.

Love always

Shelley, Darren, Christine, Maryna, Sharee, Liezel, Ayakam, Hisami,

Goh and Nanako