Welcome Taylor to our Japanese week of Summer School

Today was first day of the summer school. This week’s theme is Japanese! We learned lots of new and exciting Japanese words and songs. First thing this morning we welcomed a new friend Taylor. As soon as she came into the classroom, she found a princess dress and put it on. She made friends very soon and had a great time with her new friends. Taylor and Jennifer are both 4 years old and both like the movie ‘Frozen’, so they said they are best friends already! In the morning, Michaela, Adrien, Allie, Ava and Toku all did a Japanese matching puzzle. There are 10 pairs of Japanese items such as Boushi(hat),Kutsu (shoes),Isu (chair)and Tokei(clock) etc. On one side was a picture and on the other side was the corresponding name in Hiragana. Michaela knew the Japanese names for the items and Tokutaro could read most of them. Well done Tokutaro and Michaela! We also had some new toys and dress up costumes in the classroom. One of them was a doctor’s set. Toku was the doctor and Adrien was the patient today. Adrien had a fever, so Dr.Toku gave Adrien an injection. Ouch! We had our snack at the park today as we were worried that it would rain later. At the park, we saw lots of Ajisai (hydrangea) flowers. Ajisai bloom in June and July. Some of them are pink and some are blue and purple. After our park time, we sang a good morning song so that we could learn our friends names. The song is called “Anata no onamae wa”. We introduced our names especially for Taylor and Michaela because today was also Michaela’s first day upstairs. On the way back from the park we sang ‘konoyubi papa” with our hands. Our thumbs are papa (oto-san), and four fingers are mama (oka-san), big brother (oni-san), big sister (one-san) and baby (akachan). We also looked at the calendar together. June is the 6^th month, so we counted ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku and found June for Roku-0gatsu. We also counted 1-9 to find kyu for the 9^th. We also sang “isshuukan no uta” to find Monday for Getsuyoubi. This coming Sunday is Otousan’s day(Father’s Day) and so we started to make gifts for our Dads. We also start to make our group Ajisai picture using Origami. We will add some more flowers the rest of this week. Ayaka read a Japanese book called “Ike no oto”. In this book, you can hear lots of kinds of sounds you would normally hear around a pond. Japanese has some funny imitative words like Za-za for rain, Pochan pochan for rain drops, bunbunbun for bees, and geko geko for frogs. All our Love, Ayaka, Nanako and Darren