Making a person

Today we were fortunate to have had a beautiful sunny day in Tokyo and our time outside was filled with fun, lots of water play, friends and getting rid of our excess energy. The whole of Japan, had such high expectations of the Japanese tennis player, Kei Nishikori this morning and even though he lost his finals match, we feel that he has so much to be proud of. We always feel proud when we do something small or big; like today we all sang the words of our good morning song and Shelley said that we should give ourselves a pat on the back. We also feel proud when we do things that we think we cannot do e. g. climb on the climbing frame in the park or draw a picture of our face. Our teachers always say that it is the small things that make a difference e. g. holding a friends’ hand when we are walking in the park; sharing a toy; showing our friends how to do something that they are not sure of etc. These things in life make such a difference and we enjoy the feeling that we get when we do something special to and for others.

At our activity tables this morning we continued making pictures for “Otsukimi” with our friends who were not here yesterday. Mike, Lilian, William B, Jonah and Lucinda all worked on theirs. They did cutting, pasting, printing and sticking with tape and then completed their pictures. Some of us have photos of us working on this activity which will be pasted in our portfolios with the actual picture that we made.

Alexis, Vincent and William B drew pictures of their faces and Hisami pasted them next to the story of their names. Now we have all completed ours and when Giorgia returns, we will give her the opportunity to draw her face and have her name picture as well.

We played with the tray filled with rice today and will send it downstairs to our friends in Buds class to use. We have really enjoyed using it and look forward to playing with another medium when we get it back. At the tables in the back part of our classroom, we had another jigsaw puzzle which Daiki worked on and we had a game called “Spotty Dogs”. Liezel played this with us. For this game we had a dial with an arrow and numbers from one to six as well as cards with pictures of dogs on them. Each dog had a certain number of spots on their fur. The number of spots ranged from one to six. We spun the dial and had to find the dog with spots matching the number that the arrow landed on. At the very end of the game, we turned the cards around and saw that there were baskets with bones in them. We counted the number of bones on our cards and the winner was the one with the most bones.

Hisami read us another story about “Otsukimi” which was called “Hokari tsuki ga demashitara?” which means “What is coming out of the moon?” We laughed a lot because there were many funny things coming out of the moon, which are not true. There was a pumpkin, fish, tomato, hippopotamus, bone and a flower. The words were written in rhyme which made it sound musical.

We did a fantastic fun thing on the carpet during our morning circle.

Shelley stood up and asked us: “What am I?”

We answered many things: “You are a teacher. You are Shelley. You are teacher Shelley.”

These answers didn’t seem to satisfy her so she asked us:

“Am I a dog? Am I a lion? Am I a monkey?”

Of course she wasn’t any of these things.

Then she asked us: “What do we call lions, monkeys, dogs etc?”

And Lilian said: “Animals”.

Shelley then said: “Am I an animal?”

Lucinda said: “No, you are a people”.

Shelley: ”I am a person”.

Yay………so then we looked at her and spoke about our bodies and what they are made up of. We have two arms, two legs, one body and a head. These are the main components. Shelley said that it would be great to make a big person and so we looked at two pairs of stockings and decided that there were two legs, two arms and a body. We all got together and crumpled newspaper into balls and filled the arms, legs and body. It was and is a huge person but it is missing a head, which we will make tomorrow. Our person is dressed in an Ohana T-shirt and a pair of pants from our spare pants box. It is sitting outside our classroom and may look a bit strange to some people, because it doesn’t have a head; but it is a work in progress.

Don’t worry actually because when Shelley went outside to take a photo of our “person”, she saw that it had some more accessories. It now has a hat, gloves and boots on. Hisami wanted to make it look more like a person even though it has very long arms and legs. We need one more pair of stocking for the head so if anyone has a pair for us, please will you bring it to school tomorrow.

Thanks for a fun day today.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.