Our 3D neighbourhood is taking shape

It was so exciting to see our 3D neighbourhood growing today. Miyu made her house, Vincent made Roppongi Hills and Manuel made his hotel, the Intercontinental Hotel. While our teachers had a plan for us to make our neighbourhood, specifically Moto Azabu 3 chome, our theme from last term has made us aware of our surroundings in such a big way, they decided that we can make any buildings, parks etc. The objective for all of us this has been achieved already, so we are going to lead where it goes from now on. One of us suggested a combini too, so in the end we will have made our own neighbourhood and the last thing that we will do, is give it our own name. We will create a new area in Tokyo, Japan. When you come into our classroom, please come in and have a look at it. At the second activity table, we did some fun paint stamping. Our teachers made the stamps using different shaped blocks and bubble wrap. We dipped the bubble wrap into the paint and then stamped it on our paper. The design from the stamps made beautiful patterns. We used five colours today; pink, yellow, blue, orange and red.

While some of us were working making things for our neighbourhood, Hisami did a small group exercise with us. She introduced some toys from New Year in Japan to us e. g. kendama and komma. The kendama is a wooden toy with a ball on a string attached to it. The aim of the toy is to swing it so that the ball lands in the rounded groove. A komma is the Japanese name for a spinning top, and she showed us how to make our spinning tops that we decorated, spin. It is quite difficult as you have to wind the string around it, hold it with one hand and spin it.

The second group of children, who came to work on the neighbourhood, did some landscaping. They made trees and a park area. Tomorrow we will add some equipment in the park and make a few more buildings. Today we made doors and windows on our buildings so that you can go inside and look out of the

Windows (just pretend). We used corrugated cardboard for the very tall tree trunks and toilet rolls for the smaller ones. We used dark green crepe paper for the top of the trees and some light green tissue paper. We cut some green and brown paper as we wanted to add branches to our trees.

Then she read the story “Oki na habu” which is “The great Big Enormous Turnip” in Japanese. We love the story in English so we could understand it in Japanese, by looking at the pictures. After the story we played a game with our hands. We put our hands on the carpet and made a circle with them. We pretended that our hands were cookies, baking in the oven. She went around the circle looking for cookies which were ready to eat, saying cookie, cookie etc. When she touched our hand, we flipped it over as it needed to cook on both sides. If she touched our hand a second time, then our cookies were ready to eat.

In music today we sang and did actions to many songs viz. “Incy, Wincy Spider”, “The wheels of the bus”, “Five little monkeys”, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes”, “Old MacDonald had a farm”, “Two little fingers”, “The hokey pokey”.

We read a really interesting story called “There are no animals in this book”. It was a book about feelings but we were a little confused because there were some pictures of animals in it. Shelley bought the book at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Our last part of the day was spent relaxing and breathing deeply in our Yoga class. We did the butterfly pose which was sitting on the floor with our feet kissing each other. We bent forwards over our feet and then right and left. We did the dog pose and lifted our right leg up while keeping our hands and one foot on the floor; and we did the same with our left leg up. We made our bodies look like Tokyo Tower by standing up and putting our hands together above our heads. We then bent over to the left and to the right, stretching our bodies slowly and carefully. We did the table pose where we put our hands and feet on the floor and our tummies facing the ceiling. Just before we did the relaxation pose, we did the tree pose which again was standing up but this time we had to lift one leg up to our knee and try to balance. We did the same with our right leg. For the relaxation pose, we lay down on the ground and relaxed our bodies with our eyes closed. Hisami played quiet music for us while we were doing our Yoga today. Ommmmmmm!

We were so happy that William L came back to school today as he was sick yesterday. We hope that all of our friends, their families and our teachers stay warm tonight as it is freezing outside. Maybe snow will fall tonight and we will have white on the ground in the morning!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel