Building a teepee

The typhoon’s are here in Tokyo and we are having more rainy days than sunny ones. We are lucky that we have the MPR where we can go and play and have fun and shout just like we do when we are outside in the park. Yesterday we collected the balls and pretended that they were different colours of fruit. We had purple grapes; pink peaches; red tomatoes; blue blueberries; yellow bananas and green apples. Downstairs, we decorated our wooden sailing ships and paper boats using markers. Our teachers then attached the sails to the masts and maybe when we take them home, we can put them in the bath and see if they float. Some of us can still decorate them a little bit more at home, with markers and other drawing utensils. We read “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” for our story today and we looked curiously as the caterpillar became so big and fat. We think that he ate way too much food and he should have stayed on a healthy diet and eaten more fruit and vegetables. Nevertheless, he became a beautiful butterfly and flew from flower to flower enjoying the smells and being out in nature. One of the new things we did in our music ring was putting small finger puppet butterflies on our fingers and making them flutter around to the butterfly music on our Wiggles CD. We played musical instruments and sang our good morning song to one another.

When we arrived at school this morning, we had so many huge cardboard boxes in our classroom. Our teachers had arranged them to look like the walls of a house. There was an entrance with one large box hanging over two smaller ones. This looked just like a doorway which we enjoyed walking underneath. Koh especially liked moving the boxes around and building new things with them. William and Iva helped him.

 Upstairs, Shelley sat with us while Ayaka read two “Bob the Builder” stories to us. The one was about Opposites and Jennifer was able to name almost all of them before Ayaka could read them to us. Shelley sang the Opposite song and we guessed the opposites that she was singing about e.g. cold and hot; little and a lot; big and small; hello and goodbye; rough and smooth; heavy and light; up and down; smile and frown etc. We asked Ayaka where she was because she wasn’t at school on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. She told us that she went to Kyoto and saw about 1000 torii. These are red gates that you go through when you enter a shrine. She said that when you go through the gates, you make a wish and keep it a secret. When we arrived at school, we noticed a huge piece of cloth on the one table together with some paint pots. We put on our art smocks and we splodged and painted many different colours all over the cloth. We used black, orange, red, yellow, green, white, brown and blue. It took a while for the paint to dry as it is very humid at the moment. In fact, for a short period of time, it was not raining so we put the cloth on our balcony to dry off. What was the large piece of cloth going to be? We would find out only later in the day and wow, what a fun surprise it was going to be.

On the second table, there was a large selection of junk art material as well as scraps of wood. Tokutaro made a cat house and Beckett used markers to  decorate his boat that he made yesterday. Jennifer used a CD, a yoghurt container and a cardboard tube and she made a ship. During circle time we sang “1 block, 2 blocks, 3 blocks, 4…..” and we used the Kapla blocks for stacking during the song. We also sang “This is the way we saw the wood” and then we looked at the annual rings on a circular shaped piece of wood to see how old the tree was, that it came from. Just before we put up the large piece of cloth, we continued decorating it with coloured markers and then………it became a teepee which is a kind of a tent. We used a long tube for the center and held the sides with string. We were amazed to see the colours even when we were inside the tent. We want to say a big thank you to Darren for organizing the theme for the past week called “Let’s Build”. We made boats and cars and have some great models of things that we took home. We are looking forward to cooking with Nanako and Liezel next week. Have a great weekend!

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