The first day of Summer School

The first day of Summer School and we had a great time with so many new friends and their families. We want to say a special welcome to Hana, Elisa, Iva, Momo, Ethan, Ryan and Tom. We all had a wonderful start to our month of summer school together with our new and old friends and teachers.

Downstairs our teachers helped us settle into our new school with our new friends and we had three boys and three girls today. The boys were all our old friends from our regular class and the girls were all new. Some of them cried a little during the day however they all settled down and really enjoyed their time. We all sat down later in the day and drew on our bags that we will put together before the end of the week. We loved drawing and all learnt really quickly how to take the lids off the markers and put them back on again. We drew with many colours and used a combination of wax crayons and markers.

When we first arrived at school, we were curious about the table that was laid with bowls, cups and cutlery. We added a variety of food to our play and had a wonderful time, offering food to our friends and teachers, eating it, cooking it and playing with it. We especially liked the holes that we can crawl through in the room divider and here Hana, Zachary and Vincent had a lot of fun playing together and pretending to hide from one another.

We are already showing kindness and caring to our friends and teachers. When Elisa was crying, Iva took her hand and showed her the white board. Together they started to draw on the white board and they learnt how to clean it when they were finished too. We sang “Everybody” clapping, “Snack time”; “Lunch time”; “We all clap hands together” and “The sun shines on everyone”. We did puzzles and enjoyed the texture of our new green play dough. We rolled it and patted it and cut it and made shapes using cookie cutters.

Upstairs we focused on the theme of the week which is Japanese Immersion. We discussed shopping and what you do when you go shopping; you need money to go shopping to buy the things that you need; you need a shopping list so that you know what you are going to buy; and you need some bags to put the shopping inside. Lily, Olivia and Tokutaro all enjoyed shopping and using the cash register. Clodia had a really long shopping list. She bought eggs, bread, eggs; pizza, egg plant and she put everything inside a bag.

Momo, Beckett, Noa, Sofia and Ryan came to the table to make a Japanese obento using tissue paper. Ethan and Ryan tried all the activities and then discovered the small spring driven cars. They loved playing with them and zooming them all around the classroom. Tomo enjoyed playing with the cars on the carpet that has roads and city landmarks. When we had snack time, we sang our snack time song in Japanese. It goes like this “Oyatsu no jikan”.

When we went to the park, there was construction work on most of the equipment so we walked further on and arrived at the small park that is next to the baseball field. We enjoyed climbing up the really long ladder and coming down the slide and we liked playing in the sandbox. When we crossed the road we sang “Te wo agete” which the Japanese for our “Hands up” song for when we cross the road. During circle time, we sand “Heads and Shoulders” in Japanese and then Ayaka read us a Kamishibai story called, “Momo chan no omise ya san”. The story is about a girl who went to a friend and they pretended they were shopping. Then the ball that Momo chan was playing with rolled to the house next door where there was a baby. Momo chan wanted to buy the baby because her friend told her that if she has money, she can buy anything however; she learnt the lesson that money cannot buy everything!

We looked at real money because we spoke about going shopping and having money so that you can buy the things you need. We looked at 5Yen, 50Yen and 100Yen and then we looked at paper money. 1,000Yen is paper money. We counted in Japanese and wrote the numbers on the white board. At the activity table, we chose a piece of coloured paper and folded it to make a wallet where we will keep our money. Those of us who could write our names, wrote them on our wallets. We made our own money using circle shapes for the coins and rectangular shapes for the notes. We coloured them, cut them out and then we put our pretend money inside our wallets.

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