Friendship and Caring
What a rainy day it was today and it makes us wonder where the warm spring weather is and when it will back come to Tokyo. We don’t mind the weather as it gives us time inside our classroom to sit with our teachers and make all of the things that we need to make on a one to one. We love having this quality time with them and have wonderful discussions with one another. We sometimes sit two of us at a time, so we can learn from our friends and help them if they need help; and in turn they can help us. When we were making our number sorting boxes with Shelley, some of us were not sure what all of the numerical symbols were. However, we sat two at a time and if we didn’t know something, our friend did. Manuel helped Luka with some of the larger 
numbers, and Koh helped Akari with some of her numbers. Koh, Akari, Luka, Manuel and William L made their boxes today. Making our boxes is quite a long process as you may remember from last week, because we have to decorate our boxes, cut out all of the numbers, paste them inside the boxes, count them in order and then count the matching number of materials 
for each number.
You can see here that Luka made a drawing of a bus, the sky, a traffic light, another form of transport and some rain. We are making more discernible drawings each day, on paper and we are enjoying the fruits of our work and our learning. We are also learning how to count 
objects carefully and this helped us when we made these boxes. Every day we count our friends and teachers so we really do know how to count objects.
You may be wondering why we are hugging Luka chan. Well, he was so kind….he did beautiful “friendship and caring” for us today. He made cookies in the shape of a 
traffic light and a car and put them on a stick, wrapped them up in cellophane and ribbon and brought them to school for us. We gave him a hug and big thank you when he gave one to us. We think that he was learning about traffic lights and cars through baking and playing at home on the weekend and this was another reason that he drew the picture of the bus, car and traffic light today. Thank you Luka chan for our kindness and “friendship and caring”.
We spent part of the morning doing puzzles together with our friends and we made tiny little bees for our dioramas. Last week when we saw our dioramas coming together, we decided that we wanted to add bees to them. Today we sat down with Hisami and selected some collage materials that we wanted to use, to make them. We had some books on the table as a guide for us, so that we could create detail on our 3D bees. We used buttons, tissue paper, 
coloured matchsticks, plastic shaped collage materials, wiggly eyes, pipe cleaners and our good old glue gun. When our teachers use the glue gun, things adhere really quickly. We selected what we wanted, made some of the things and then told Hisami where they needed to be glued.
Because our dioramas are 3D we of course cannot paste them into our workbooks/portfolios. We will try our best to take photos of the things that we 
made and if we can, we will take one of our entire diorama.
In our gymnastics class, we did our usual warm up and walked around the room. When we heard the whistle blow, we stopped and froze. We did the bunny walk and jumping jacks, which are quite tiring. We hopped on one leg to the mat, did a somersault with Miyashita sensei supporting our necks 
and helping us, then we had to hop around the red cushion. The second time that we did a somersault; we jumped like a rabbit around the red cushion. For the gorilla game, we had one mat at each end of the room. When Miyashita sensei counted one, two, three, we had to walk towards him; when he shouted ‘gorilla’ we stood on the mat.
Our days at school are filled with all sorts of interesting and varied things. We have been singing our songs for our End of Year Party and our teachers sent a document to our mums and dads, to fill in for our snack after the party.
We practiced singing our Japanese song using props and we also went inside our “beehive” and pretended to be bees, waiting to fly out and look for nectar and pollen. We are looking forward to having fun with our friends, teachers and parents at our party, but we are not happy that our Petals Class year is coming to an end!
Stay warm and dry this afternoon and see you tomorrow.
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel