Cold and squishy feet

Welcome back after a rainy, hot, humid weekend in Tokyo. We were happy to be back at school today and had a full day of learning, fun and of course, trying out our new obento lunches. Downstairs, we tasted the food and some of the things we didn’t like so much. We all really liked the rice and the pickles and some of us ate all the meat and vegetables too. Upstairs we tried everything and enjoyed eating the same food as our friends. The meals were a little different from one another (upstairs and downstairs) and we look forward to seeing what’s in store for us tomorrow. We really liked the containers that the food came in…..  You can see from the one photo here that we were really curious to see what was inside our obento containers; and we are looking curiously at everything.

Upstairs we have been comparing our heights and the size of our feet. We noticed that Darren has the longest feet; Jamie is the tallest at 111cms and Jennifer is the shortest at 97cms. We put our names on the height chart and will measure ourselves throughout the year and see how much we grow.

At our activity table today, we selected a colour from the red, green, yellow and blue paints and then poured some paint onto a sponge in a shallow dish. We spread the paint all over the sponges and then took our shoes off. What were we going to do? We were making foot prints! The paint felt all cold and squishy in between our toes. We counted down from 10 to zero just like they do when they launch a rocket into space and on zero, we put our feet onto the paper to make a colourful footprint.

While we were in the library we made new rules. We all decided on these rules as a group; take one book out; be careful with books; put books back slowly on the shelf when you finish and sit down to read. We read the book “Toes, ears and nose” and answered the questions that were asked in the book viz. “Inside my mittens I’ve got”…..hands; “Inside my boots I’ve got”…..feet; “Under my hat are two”…………..ear. We sang “Where is Thumbkin?” and did actions to the song. In the afternoon while some of our friends were still resting, we focused on the letter “Aa” and sang “A, a, ants on my arm”. We used our arms to make the shape of a lower case “a” in the air. We practiced writing both the lower and upper case letters on paper and on the whiteboard. We looked at picture flashcards and had to identify the one that did not start with the sound “a”. This was fun. We looked at the picture and the word in order to find the correct answer.

Downstairs as part of our theme “Who am I?” we are focusing on what different parts of our bodies can do e.g. our hands are for picking up toys; our eyes are for blinking; our nose is for smelling; our mouth is for eating with; our ears are for listening; our feet are for walking with; our tummy is for mixing food. These thoughts were all of our thoughts except the last one with our tummies. Shelley helped us with it! It was a bit difficult for us to think about what are tummies do because we cannot see inside our tummies so we can’t really imagine what goes inside of it. We sang “What are my eyes for?” and are learning the words each day. We also sang “Open them, shut them” and enjoy doing the actions.

We did a really fun activity using pegs; first learning how to use a peg. Shelley called it the squeezing game. We sang and squeezed the pegs which were quite hard to squeeze. Our little fingers are not yet strong enough so we found some clothes pegs which are looser and then we were able to squeeze them. We then each took a mitten and hung it on the washing line. When we realised that we were so good at it, we kept on coming back for more and more until the tin of pegs was empty.

At the activity table we sat and played with play dough while some of our friends were on the mat for free play. Later on in the morning, we did a tearing activity with tissue paper. We had to use our pointer finger and our thumb for this activity. These were the very same fingers which we used when we squeezed the pegs. We tore the tissue paper into long strips as well as other irregular shapes; then we took glue sticks and pasted the tissue paper onto a large piece of white paper. We will use this background for another activity on Wednesday.

Outside we had fun in the park, while the weather was a little cloudy. The temperature was cooler and we were fortunate not to have any rain.

Thanks for a wonderful start to the week.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Christine, Nanako, Sabine, Ayaka and Goh.