Welcome Jou kun
We welcomed everyone back after a warm weekend and we were also happy to welcome Jou Karakisawa to our class. He, his mom and his brother came to school this morning. He cried a little because it was the first time that he had been away from his mum. He is two and a half years old and he seemed to enjoy his day in the end. He stayed till we went to the park and he will attend Ohana on Mondays and Thursdays from now. He loved painting and especially enjoyed the trains and looking at the books about trains. He also participated in our music time when we did movement to music. We look forward to seeing him again on Thursday. We started off our day at the play dough table. We were so curious because on the table were two long pieces of play dough and two balls of play dough. There were trees and an assortment of animals. There was a piece of blue cellophane on the table that represented a water hole. There were two hippopotami on the blue and other animals drinking from the water hole. It intrigued us and our teachers observed something really interesting. We played with the play dough separately from the display and only Sui chan put some play dough in the giraffe’s mouth; the rest of us made things, rolled the play dough and cut it but left the display as it was. Shelley will do it again and see what we do with it tomorrow and Renshi is coming and he hasn’t seen it yet so the questions is “What will we do with the play dough and animals tomorrow?”
Later in the morning when we went to the mat for our morning circle time, we sang good morning to our friends in a few different languages. We did an action and sang “I’m looking to see who is tapping their knees/clicking their fingers etc”. We said good morning in Norwegian, English, Japanese, French and Afrikaans. We then sang our ‘Days of the week’ song which we didn’t really need to, because Finn knew that today was Monday. Of course, we love singing the song and hearing the different tones so Shelley sang it and we could also try to guess what day it was. Shelley told us that it was her mum’s birthday today so we decided to sing to her mum, even though she lives in Australia. Maybe she could feel our wishes coming to her even if she couldn’t hear us. We sang the “Numba Rhumba” and we did a puzzle that has the numeric symbols on it. Each of us had a few numbers and we had to find where they belonged. The numbers went from one to ten.
In the one picture here, Jou kun is enjoying painting and in the other picture, Rocky the Raccoon is a part of our role playing story about sharing things with our friends. Rocky was asking Finn to help him. Rocky was looking for a friend. One day he met a frog and the frog grabbed his toy and he got really angry and upset. He told the frog that you have to say “May I please play with this toy?” as this is the best way to share and make friends. The frog needed us to help him remember the words so we taught the frog what to say. The result was that they became good friends and helped many other creatures in the forest to learn how to share.
Our table activities today were play dough, painting and cutting. The painting activity was a free activity and we could paint whatever we wanted to. The cutting activity was structured. We had to cut along a black line in three different places. The paper that we were cutting was the one that we had decorated for our koinobori. We will each have a piece of the koinobori’s body with scales on it, to paste into our workbooks. The 
koinobori was too large to paste in our workbooks so this was the next best alternative together with a photo of the whole fish. It was a busy day and we cannot believe that there are only three weeks left before the end of this school year. WOW!
Love Shelley and Darren