The day after the snowy night!

It was a real snowy night and it left us with slippery roads and sidewalks in Tokyo. It was really cold when we arrived at school today so we spent the day inside but were really lucky because something from outside came inside! That may sound confusing but let us explain. There are so many things in nature that are wonderful to explore with snow being one of them. How were we going to be able to explore and play with snow if we were not going to go outside? Well our beautiful teacher Kana had a brilliant idea. She went to collect some snow and she brought it into the classroom for us to play with. She first made a snowman and then SURPRISE, she came out of the office with her beautiful snowman. She also had a bucket full of snow so she removed the snowman and but the snow on a tray for us to play with. You can see from the photo how happy Kana was with her snowman! She then gave us the cones from our ice cream game and after a while she added some food colouring and we had blue coloured icy snow. We had so much fun. Gento was laughing so loudly while he was playing with the snow. We scooped it into our cups and cones and then we noticed that it started to disappear. Soon there was no snow left; there was just ice and then there was only water. Thanks Kana for being so spontaneous and quick thinking. You gave us a wonderful learning experience today. During free play time, we played with the new animal counters that Shelley brought back from Australia. There are red, blue, green and red counters all in the shape of animals; tigers, kangaroos, apes, camels, giraffes, bears, lions, hippos and elephants. After we had played with the animals, we played a game in our morning circle to consolidate and reinforce the names of all of the colours. We used a new wooden game, also from Australia with shapes that have to be carefully maneuvered onto a stick. Shelley took squares in red, orange, yellow, blue and green. We sang a song to see who was wearing one of the corresponding colours of the squares. Tokutaro had green pants, Nico had a blue striped top, Gento had orange pants, Shoko had red on her socks and Miya had yellow on her teddy bear sticker. We then hid our shapes behind our backs and had to try and remember who had which colour. We were able to remember some of them easily.

We did another new activity today using shape punches. We have small shape punches that we have to use so much of our strength with and sometimes this is not enough. These punches are squeezing ones. You slide the paper in where the slot is and you squeeze down with either one or two hands; and BINGO, the shape comes out. We spent quite a long time doing this activity as we became excited every time we saw a new shape come out. We used many different colours and then we changed the shapes so that we could punch out different ones. Then we pasted the negative and positive shapes onto a piece of white paper. The negative shapes are the ones that were on the small paper squares and the positive ones were the small ones that came out of the punch. We did music with our friends and teachers and walked and danced and sang. We did “The Monkey Dance”; “Hot Potato”; “Shake your sillies out”; “Butterfly”; “Where is Thumbkin” and we sang our “Hello” song. Now everyone is able to sing their names when we sing this song which makes us all feel happy. Thanks for a great “snowy” day.

Love Shelley, Darren, Kana, and Sabine