Kono iro wa nani?

Today was Lilian’s first day on the second floor with us and so her sister Ava was being very helpful and showing her how to do the morning jobs. For our morning table activity, everyone took turns to print leaves on a piece of white paper to start our ‘ajisai’ (hydrangea) painting. We talked about how we see ajisai only in the rainy season just like we only see sakura in the Spring. For this activity, we first rolled some green paint on a cutting board with a hard roller. Then we placed either a leaf shaped piece of paper or an actual leaf on to the paint on the cutting board and pressed it on to the white paper. We carefully lifted the leaf off from the paper and made beautiful ‘midori’ leaf prints with veins. Meanwhile, on the small activity table, Noa, Lilian and Ava worked some more on marbling with Darren. Some friends practiced writing ‘a i u e o’ from a book called Aiueo no Uta written by Shuntaro Tanigawa, a famous Japanese poet. It starts out like this ‘aiueokiro oeui asa da, ookina akubi, aiueo’ (Wake up, it’s morning, let’s make a big yawn!). Our other friends were busy dressing up becoming professions of different kinds – Jennifer and Taylor were princesses, Blue was ‘just a King,’ Noa was a police officer and Tokutaro and Ava were astronauts. As we could already see some dark clouds covering the sky, we rushed to the park with our snacks and sang a couple of rain songs such as ‘ame furi,’ ‘rain rain go away’ and ‘teru teru bozu.’ Despite our wish for the rain to go away, we felt the raindrops soon after we had a bit of running around so we headed back to school feeling a few of the raindrops on our heads. For circle time, we talked about the seasons, months, date and days. When I asked about the four seasons in Japanese, Tokutaro answered ‘haru’ and Jennifer, ‘natsu’ and ‘fuyu.’ We also sang ‘aiueo no uta’ and ‘isshukan no uta.’ We then talked about five colors in Japanese – ‘midori’ for green, ‘kiro’ for yellow, ‘aka’ for red and ‘ao’ for blue. We wanted to make purple, one of Nanako’s favorite colors which Ava and Tokutaro helped by suggesting that red and blue will make purple. These colors were used at the big table to print the flowers of the ajisai painting. We placed a stencil, cut out in the shape of flowers with four petals on top of the painted leaves and patted over with sponges soaked in paint. Blue was patting blue and red on to his painting saying, “Look, I’m making your favorite color!” You can see the beautiful ajisai we all made! For our library time, we read two stories: one called Kono Iro Nani and Jankenpon both written by another famous Japanese children’s book author called Keiko Sena. One was about a girl called Ruruchan exploring through different colors and the other one about the sun, a cloud and a couple of other friends playing ‘janken’ to decide whether to make the day sunny or to snow. After we finished the books we all played janken using an old Japanese song called ‘hana sakan’ to decide who to wash their hands first before eating lunch. Although, the cloud won the janken against the sun and made it a cloudy and wet day, we had another fun busy time on the second floor! All our Love, Nanako and Darren