Danke Schon Carolin......

A beautiful sunny day greeted us this morning however it was soooooo cold. When we went to the park, we made sure that we stayed in the sunshine, so that we could be a bit warmer. Actually, to be honest, when we are playing, we do not even think about the weather. We think that our teachers and adults think about the weather too much. Yossi didn’t want to wear a big jacket to the park today even though we were all so cold. This proves that sometimes the weather is in our minds and not always in our bodies!

We started building our group castle today on one of the activity tables. We have lots of pieces of styrofoam which we cut with a hot wire cutter together with our teachers. Our castle is going to be a 3D castle. 3D means anything you can find in real life. You can see how tall or how far up and down it goes, how wide it is or how far it goes from side to side, or how far back it goes. We decided to use grey for the towers that we will place on each corner and started to paint some of them today. We will work on the wall pieces tomorrow and during next week.

On another one of our activity tables, we had some damp sand, cups and spoon which were there all ready for us to try to make sand castles. It took a bit of practice for us to use the right amount of water and sand, so that it would hold together when we removed the moulds. Some of us started to work on our own individual small castles using wood, card board tubes, tape, markers and glue. Those of us who started making ours yesterday, started decorating ours today and they look really colourful.

After snack time, we looked at books about castles and decided to make a small castle using wooden blocks. We noticed that there is so much detail on some castles and that most of them have a moat. We learned some new words about castles e. g. towers, walls, moat, drawbridge and keep. A keep is a kind of building that is inside a castle in a round or square shape; and if the people inside the castle were at war and they had to go somewhere to escape the enemy, they went inside the keep. When we were at the park, Sean, Marc, Adrien and Beckett all helped make a castle out of sand with a moat around it. Beckett was responsible for filling the moat with water to “keep away the bad guys”. On the way back from the park, we went to the Community Centre across the road and sang some songs for the people who were there. We sang “Twinkle, twinkle little star” in Japanese and English and then we sang “Obento bako ni”, our regular lunch time song in Japanese. We think that the people there really enjoyed seeing us and listening to our singing before they ate their lunch.

Downstairs, we had a fabulous time learning about Germany and specifically “Carnival” in Germany with Carolin, Liam’s mum. It is a very special time for people to dress up, wear masks and fancy dress costumes, sing and parade in the streets and eat delicious food. In German it is called “Fasching”. Carolin brought along pictures of people wearing masks and dressed up as different characters. We wanted to also have “Fasching” so she gave us each a mask and we decorated them with markers and other drawing materials. We then added stickers and glitter and feathers and were all ready for our Ohana carnival.

When we had completed our masks went to the mat and Carolin spoke to us about decorating the room. She said that people us lots of different things for their decorations and one of them is streamers. We had so much fun opening the streamers up and trying to blow them as they looked so beautiful when they unrolled. We ended up playing in the streamers and with them and then after snack time, we collected them and squeezed them into plastic bags and made them into balls, which we threw to our friends and tried to catch too.

We learnt some steps for a dance called “The Chicken Dance” in English. This dance is a very popular dance in Germany during “Fasching”. Then we went to the snack table and after eating our own snacks, we tasted some real German pretzels, freshly baked and some home made Apple Cake. Not all of us wanted to taste everything and we could choose what we wanted to try. Carolin, we want to say a huge thank you to you for all the wonderful things we did today learning about Germany and the special “Fasching” time that actually took place last weekend and some of this week. We loved everything that you did and enjoyed having you in our class. Shelley said that Sabine phoned her while carnival was on in her city in Germany and there was a parade outside Sabine’s apartment. Shelley saw the people in their fancy dress costumes, having a huge street party. Carnival looks like a great festival in Germany. Danke schon!