Sumo and Dr. Michaela

Friday, February 20^th, 2015 Did you know that there are so many things that come from Japan? These are some of the things that we thought of today, with a little help from our teachers – origami, onigiri, yakitori, Tokyo Tower, Mount Fuji, Hina Matsuri, Karate, Kendo, Sumo, sushi, mochi, taxis that doors open automatically and the special toilets that keep you warm. We think that there are lots more things that come from Japan but our teachers think that they are a bit adult for us.

Today we welcomed Asako san, Miyu’s mum and Mayuko san, Vincent’s mum who came to teach us how to make Osumo using origami paper. We chose a piece of origami paper that was either plain or had patterns on it; then we listened carefully to instructions and looked at a chart that showed us what to do. We folded the paper in half to make a triangle shape. Then we made a small triangle from the one point at the top. You can see the directions here.

We folded arms and drew a face on the white part. Then we took our “osumo” and placed them onto a box that we called the “dojyo”. There were two lines drawn and we had to put our “osumo” behind the lines. Shelley took a fan which is called a “sensu” and the referee, “gyoji” has to put the “sensu” horizontal and then the match begins. We got so excited as we hit our hands on the boxes to make our “osumo” move and be the winner. We did this many times and laughed so hard and actually we were not even concerned whether our “osumo” won or not, we were just enjoying banging on the boxes. Our teachers think that it was almost like we were playing taiko. We had so much fun and enjoyed having Charlie with us too. We want to say a huge thank you to Mayuko san and Asako san. We think that they also had fun with us.

When they left we did some activities at the tables. We completed our Hina dolls and we did another activity using dot paints, paper, glue, scissors and markers. This was a free creative activity where we could make whatever we wanted to. We also took our completed art home which we don’t often do. Most of our art work we keep for our portfolios.

You can see from the photos that we were very focused on what we were doing and took a long time to complete our creations. Some of us wrote our names underneath the names that our teachers wrote as we are practicing to write our names at the moment. At the moment we still have the heater on so our art work dried before we went home, which was lucky for us. Our teachers like to keep almost all of our art work that we make for our portfolio/workbooks but today were different.

For Show and Tell Michaela was Dr. Michaela. She brought along her bag with all her doctors tools and she started off by telling us that doctors wear coats and pants and they go and look after people. When she opened her bag up there were so many things. She explained what everything was for and then we all had turns to listen to our friends and teacher’s heart beats through a real stethoscope. Michaela was so happy sharing her things with us. She had a bottle with medicine in it, a syringe to give you a shot which is sometimes “ouchie” she said, a bowl in case you need to spit something out from your mouth, a light to look inside your mouth, a mirror also to look inside your mouth, some band aids to kiss an “ouchie” better, a small bottle to squeeze something into your eye, another thing that looked like a syringe that you put medicine inside and you squirt it into your mouth, tweezers to take something out of your arm, and of course the stethoscope to listen to your heart beat. When we listened to one another’s heart beats, we heard “baboom, baboom, baboom”. It sounded really far away and was quite low and deep. Thanks for coming to school today, Dr. Michaela.