Having fun with building blocks
We are so excited for everyone to see our new website and this is the new URL. Ohana International School in Tokyo will still have the old URL and website but this one is the one where it is all happening! Please take a look at www.school-in-tokyo.com and enjoy reading all of our journals and the exciting things happening at our school. Today is the beginning of another week and it is actually the last week of February. The second month of 2011 will soon be over and we are thankful to know that soon the weather will be warmer and it will be the beginning of spring.
We have fantastic new cars and trucks to play with. A friend of Shelley’s gave them to us together with some new books in English and Japanese and she took the cars out today. There is a double-decker London bus; a Greyhound bus; a huge truck that carries cars; a cement mixer; a gasoline tanker; a fire truck with a ladder that extends three times its original length; large cars with doors and bonnets that open and many other regular cars. Shelley packed away the other cars so that we could focus on the new ones and not have too many to choose from. Nico built an amazing construction using the coloured blocks and Sui chan enjoyed playing with the stickle bricks.
Our story today was an interactive story. Some of the sentences had pictures in them which we could look at and say the word relating to the picture. The story was called “Inside the Barn, inside the country”. It was about animals on a farm and what they were doing inside the barn in the night time. Every line had a sentence and a picture of an animal so when Shelley pointed to the animal, we could say the word. There was a mouse, cow, horse, sheep, chickens, hens, a duck, a dog, a rooster and in the end they all woke the farmer up. Oh! Oh! He told them that they should go back to sleep as it was not the morning; and they did! Sometimes we wake up in the middle of the night and our parents tell us the same thing!
At the activity tables we did bead threading onto pipe cleaners. We could choose how long we wanted the pipe cleaner to be. We could make a bracelet, necklace, ring or whatever we wanted to. Most of us made bracelets. Two of us wanted to make a necklace however when we started to make them we realized that it would take quite while to complete them. We persevered and made beautiful ones which we will probably give to our mums. The second activity was related to a discussion that we had during our morning circle time.
Today we learnt the concepts “in front” and “behind”. Shelley asked us what was in front of her. We told her that we were all sitting in front of her. Then she asked us what was behind her and we saw a large tree trunk on a piece of cardboard. Then she went around the circle and asked all of us what was behind us. The table was behind Thorsten; the toys were behind Finn and Laura; the heart cushion was behind Sui; the tiger was behind Darren and Nico. Shelley showed us a book about a tree. We noticed that the thick strong part of the tree has branches coming out of it. Our project today was making the branches on the tree. This is going to be our “Friendship Tree”. We have different coloured hearts and every day, when we do something special to our friends and teachers, we will get a heart to place on the tree. We are not sure how many hearts we will all get and will count them at the end of the month.
The tree is significant as it marks the end of our project on Friendship and Feelings and it also comes at a time when we see the end of one season and the beginning of another.
Wishing you all a wonderful afternoon
Love Shelley and Darren