Japanese Kimonos

Dear Flower Class parents, We hope you all had a great long weekend and enjoyed the beautiful weekend weather. It was great to see so many smiling faces this morning when we arrived at school. We had only a very short morning as the teachers told us we would be having a special guest called Petronella from Finland. We found on the carpet the large tent made from purple fabric which we enjoyed playing under last week. Also on the carpet was the big set of weighing scales we used to measure how heavy we are last week in class. Today instead of measuring how heavy we are we decided to measure how heavy some of the other items in the class are. We found some big wooden blocks and tried weighing them. Many of them were 0.4 kilograms. In the dress up corner we got our lots of play food, crockery and cutlery and made breakfast for our friends. On the main table we saw the white twigs we painted last week and came to the table to make our bone skeletons. The play-dough on the table was also very popular today too. After packing away the toys we met Petronella and she introduced herself in our mini name circle. Petronella told us how she has been in Japan for 3 weeks and will stay until about December. She asked us if we knew what a Kimono was and we said we had seen them before. Petronella then read a book all about Japanese culture. The book introduced a little girl called Suki who went to a Japanese festival and experienced lots of new things. Her grandmother gave her a Kimono and some wooden shoes which she wore to school but the other children laughed at her. Suki did the right thing and ignored their comments. Later the teacher clapped after Suki danced a traditional festival dance and she danced all the way home. After the book we told Petronella all about our favorite clothes including: Yukata, Princess Dresses, Peter Pan and Superman costumes. We then moved to the table to color in our own Kimono pictures with colored pencils. We discussed some of the other Japanese festivals such as 7-5-3 day, Boys and Girls Day in Japan. It was fun and we all said a sad “Goodbye” to Petronella. After snack we went to the park and liked playing in the sunshine. We saw lots of butterflies and enjoyed playing in the sand-box too. In circle time we practiced the Ohana song together and have now learnt 3 paragraphs from the song. We then looked at our own life books or our friends and especially looked at what our family were wearing in the pictures. We moved to the table to add the details to our ‘Family’ drawings we started last week. Our pictures are looking really good now and we will put them in our special portfolios soon.

Have a great afternoon and we look forward to seeing you all again tomorrow.

All our love, Darren, Ayaka, Maki and Ryoan.