What can you do?

We were sooo happy to welcome Gento back to school today. He arrived early and settled well soon after some of his friends had arrived. He went straight to the shelves with the cars and then explored the rest of the room, trying to remember what he really liked to play with etc. We all had a turn to play with our teachers to see if we could do certain things e.g. puzzles, cutting, counting, naming and matching colours and also naming shapes. We were all able to use a pair of scissors somehow and those of us who are still learning how to hold it, have to be really careful that we don’t cut ourselves. Yossi knows his colours in Hebrew and Gento knows some of his colours in Japanese. The rest of us know them in English. This is great because we can all learn from one another. We also looked at a few shapes which we found a little tricky. We sat together on the mat and sang some of our favourites songs which we will sing on the last day of the year at our end of year party. This is going to be such fun. Today we sang “Tommy Thumb”; “Hello”; “Open them shut them”; “Five little leaves”; “Twinkle, twinkle little star”; “ABC song” and “Do the monkey”. We sang “Do the monkey” while we were doing activities at the table and we didn’t even need the music on the CD. We read a new book that Shelley bought at the Nishimachi Flea Market on Saturday. It is called “Baby Bear, Baby Bear, what do you see?”. It is from the same series as “Brown Bear” except we saw some interesting new animals that we had never heard of. There was a screech owl, a prairie dog, a blue heron, a rattlesnake and many others. We had a wonderful time in the park and enjoyed playing outside on this warm, sunny day. We practiced our

balancing skills in the park. We used a bench near the tap at the opposite end of the park for this. Sabine sat at the end of the bench and we walked along it and there she was to pick us up as if we were flying in the air. We loved doing the activity and our teachers could see whether we were able to balance or not.

Upstairs we played with a new game called “Mousetrap”. We especially liked the contraption in the middle, where a ball rolls down a slope, hits a tower, makes a ball drop through a bath onto a see saw which then throws a plastic diver into a tub which knocks a cage down to trap a mouse.

We spent time dressing up and engaged in imaginative play as our friends downstairs shared some of their dress up clothes with us. Miya was a movie star, Oliver was a monster and a pirate, Emily was a lady with a scarf and Noah was a Kun Fu master. Today we also did cooking with Kana. We made Maple Syrup French Toast. We read into pieces which we placed on a baking tray. We mixed eggs, nmilk and maple syrup and poured the mixture over the bread. We placed it in the oven and baked it for 20 minutes. We loved it and even Oliver who usually doesn’t like eating sweet things ate it and enjoyed it.

The whole school did an earthquake and fire drill today. We pretended that there was smoke and put our hand over our mouth so that we wouldn’t breathe it into our lungs; and for the earthquake drill, we hid under the table.

We can put on and take off our T-shirts which is quite a difficult thing to do. Some of us think that we cannot do something even before we have tried; and then we surprise ourselves and realize that we can do many things.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Sabine, Goh and Kana