Tanabata week

Dear Summer School parents, We had a great day today and started our new theme for this week titled ‘Tanabata’ (Tanabata meaning "Evening of the seventh"), also known as the Star Festival, is a Japanese festival originating from the Chinese Qixi Festival. It celebrates the meeting of the deities Orihime and Hikoboshi (represented by the stars Vega and Altair respectively). Popular customs relating to the festival varied by region of the country, but generally, girls wished for better sewing and craftsmanship, and boys wished for better handwriting by writing wishes on strips of paper.  For this theme we are looking at stars and also space. We were also joined by our new friend Miyu who came to join us to help out in class today. Miyu is 12 years old and Darren used to teach her many years ago when she was 3 or 4 years old. On the table this morning we saw two paint activities. For the first activity we took a piece of black paper and put it into the lid of a card box. We then used a spoon to add some silver and gold paint to the paper.  Using a marble we created some wonderful space pictures by rolling the marble back and forwards across the paper through the paint. This was lots of fun and we were very proud of our artwork. For the second picture we again chose some black paper to look like space and then using a brush with white and gold paint we flicked it onto the paper to make a starry night sky.  Tomorrow we will add some more details to our wonderful artwork. On the second table we saw a big box of junk art materials and many of us decided to make our own rockets. We used some plastic coffee containers and firstly taped them together to make a longer tube structure. We then used some paint markers on the sides of the rocket and added pieces of card and tape too. In the free play area we saw the train sets and the wooden blocks and decided to put these together. With the wooden blocks we made a tower with our friends. The train tracks were also very popular today and we put together lots and lots of tracks before putting the trains on them. In our mini circle time we introduced our theme for the week and sang our ‘good morning’ song to learn the names of all our friends. After eating our yummy snacks we went to the park. We made sure we took our water bottles with us as it was very hot. Unfortunately all of the flowers in the small Ohana garden at the park have died and there were many weeds growing. Several of us wanted to help dig out the weeds and so we got some trowels and started to dig. We will continue with the digging tomorrow if the weather is good. In our main circle time we looked at a book together called ‘Don’t let the Aliens take my marvelous mum’. It was a funny book with many aliens with lots of arms and eyes and told us all about all the things we couldn’t do or get if our mums were ‘abducted’ by aliens. We then started making our own Tanabata sticks with messages and decoration on them. Today we made the stick by carefully rolling some green paper and then taping the ends and center. Tomorrow we will start making the message cards and other decoration too.

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

All our love, Darren, Pauline, Liezel & Miyu