Zoh desu, uma desu, kirin desu......

We had some animal friends today to greet us for our good morning song. We had a “zoh”, “kirin”, “uma”, “butta” and “panda”. We like having props when we are learning things as this helps us understand instructions and how to do things. We sang good morning to them in Japanese and they answered in Japanese. Then we had our turn to sing our names. Hisami taught us to say our name and then “desu” at the end.

We started off the day making some more ‘teru teru bozu’ with our friends who did not come to school yesterday. The rain seems to be ignoring our ‘teru teru bozu’ however we think that since we now have a few more hanging in our classroom, all of them together, may have the power to stop the rain this afternoon. We have been singing our “Rain, rain, go away” song and the ‘teru teru bozu” song in the hope that we can make a difference to the weather.

At our activity tables this morning, we had one table completing the ‘teru teru bozu’ and since only two of us do this activity at the same time, at the very same table, we had an activity with clothes pegs and empty containers. Our task was to squeeze the pegs and fit them onto the containers. Vincent became creative with his pegs and joined a whole lot of them together, which looked interesting.

We reinforced our knowledge of the names of colours in Japanese and English with a marbling activity. You may remember that our Workbooks/Portfolios, which we gave our parents as a gift at the end of the regular school year, well these are covered in paper that has been designed with marbling ink. We had “aka, ciro, orenji, ao, curo, midori” to choose from. We could choose three colours for our marble painting. After dropping a few drops of the colours that we chose, into a large tray of water, we mixed the colours with a chopstick.

In Japanese we say, “hashi”. Then we placed a large piece of white paper onto the surface of the water and we counted in Japanese. “Ichi, ni, san, shi, goh, roku, shichil, hachi, kyu, jyu”. While we counted we did different actions; we clapped, we jumped, we lifted our legs up, we clicked our fingers etc. Then Shelley lifted up the paper and ………………………it was so beautiful. Each one, turned out differently and we were so surprised. It felt like we had made magic.

Hisami sang a song about “daruma” and then she read “Otsuki sama ga”. We sang “Hajimariyo” and made our hands into many different creatures. We made a tako – octopus, cho cho – butterfly and then we put our hands on many different parts of our body. We learnt the alphabet sounds in Japanese again and tried to remember the ones that we have already done. We practiced “ah, ii, uu, eh, oh”. We all had turns to say these sounds and after we said them, Hisami said ‘subarashi” which means ‘great, fantastic’. Hisami showed us what the letters look like. Then she wrote our names in Japanese using the same letters that she had already showed us. We had some time to play in the MPR downstairs. We have some new feet balancing toys which are quite difficult to use; and most importantly you have to balance on them. Today was another fun day learning Japanese with our teachers. Tomorrow will be our last Japanese day before we head into “Kings of Construction”, our second week of Summer School.

We hope our friend Jonah is feeling better and while we know that he will not be at school tomorrow, we look forward to seeing him on Monday.

Love always Shelley, Hisami, Nanako, Sharee, Liezel, Ayaka and Goh.