Happy Hinamatsuri! Hinamatsuri (also called Girls’ Day or Dolls’ Day) is celebrated every 3rd of March every year. This Japanese festival is celebrated to pray for happiness and good health of girls. We are lucky to have M’s dad, K to come and talk about Hinamatsuri today. He said, “Hinamatsuri is a day to smile and eat yummy food.
He brought a big poster of hina dolls display. Many thanks to K who drew this poster for today’s presentation. We also listened to the Hinamatsuri song in English. Then, we received a gift of origami odairi-sama and hina-sama dolls. K said, “Wow!” when he saw that the dolls could stand on the floor. K’s attention was drawn to it and said while pointing at it, “Papa!”. S was so happy to receive it and shared with his teachers, “Mommy and my Daddy!” while pointing at the dolls
Our teachers prepared an enlarged passport to keep our memories for this year’s international months. Please look forward to receiving your passport at the end of the school year.
MORNING ACTIVITIES
We had lots of fun engaging in the materials that were available for table and floor activities. On one table, we liked picking small pompons and glued them on the craft sticks frame. This was just the beginning of decorating this special gift for our moms! We can’t wait to see it finished, too! On another table, we enjoyed a water-transfer activity where we used pipettes to transfer water from one bowl to another. We were amazed to see how we could transfer water quite easily!
The tuff table had some lined papers taped on the sides to practice our cutting skills, while we enjoyed touching the shiny party streamers that were inside the table. We had lots of fun playing with LEGO blocks and kitchen toys as well. Marie noticed the CDs on the whiteboard and was fascinated by moving them around the board.
CIRCLE TIME
At the beginning of our circle time, we sang our special song for mom’s day. We tried our best to do the actions for the songs and working on blowing kisses! We hope that we can do this before our moms come for our Moms’ Day. Before doing our attendance activity, Vieda took our attention to the CDs on board. M and S said, “Circle!”. S, K and M led us to count the CDs. As we moved to our attendance activity, Vieda asked about the school and home pictures. H replied, “Ohana. Home” as he identified the pictures correctly. When called to put his name on the board, he said, “My name!”. L noticed one of our friends was not ready yet and said, “Sit down!”. We are very happy to hear our friends expressing themselves.
Today’s topic for our circle time was about the people who take care of our neighborhood. Previously, we talked about the police officers and fire fighters. We listened to the sirens without looking at pictures and tried to identify which vehicle it was coming from. H quickly said, “Ambulance!” while K replied, “Kyukyusha!” for the ambulance siren. We saw ambulances and fire trucks when we visited the fire station last year. This coming Friday, we will visit the police box and greet the police officers there. We are excited about this visit!
INDOOR FUN
Being indoors can be fun, too! We had some stations set up in the room and had the chance to play where our interests took us. We had a tunnel where K, L, and L enjoyed doing so much, while some of our friends felt a little scared crawling through it. We had fun playing with balls by putting them in the buckets or rolling them around the room. There was a threading station, too, where we enjoyed putting blocks and shapes together in a string. We had such a fun and wonderful time moving our bodies as we played in different stations.
We hope your rainy Tuesday was as fun as ours! See you tomorrow!
Please remember to wear your Ohana T-shirt tomorrow.
Lots of love,
Buds XOXO