Japanese Culture Day

Japanese Culture Day

Yesterday was Japanese Culture day at abroad. Every year it is one of our best activities, mainly because it brings in lots of people form the community: this year we had a taiko drumming group, including some performers with special needs, and some grandmothers and grandfathers sharing traditional games and crafts. The kids were a little disappointed that only the older classes got to do Nagai noumen, but I think Chiya Sensei might be able to set it up again for us next week.

The taiko drumming was a little noisy for the kids, but they didn't seem to worry as much when it was their turn to bang the drums.

They loved playing with all of the toys and were very well behaved and respectful towards our guests.

Park Photography

Super secret things are going in preschool B at the moment, as the kids finalize their costume, music and dance selections for the year End Performance. I feel like I have told you too much already, by way of explaining how it will work this year, and I'm sure the kids have and will tell you more; probably you wont see much of our preparations posted on this blog, as we want to have some surprises.

The kids are exploring all the different kinds of art, including photography. so here are some of their pictures that they took on a recent trip to the park:

 

YEP and Painting Feelings

This we the class started to recover from the flu epidemic and on Friday we had everyone in attendance for the first time in several weeks. We also had some visitors; the IB inspectors came on Monday and joined the class for some painting. The kids enjoyed speaking with them, telling them what they were painting and whether it was happy, sad or angry.

At the start of the activity we also looked at some example paintings and placed emotion stickers on them to show how they made us feel. The 'angry' painting got a lot of 'happy' stickers, which was interesting. We talked about why they put them there and the kids explained that it was because it made them feel excited.


Our inquiry wall is growing steadily. We have started watching the videos from last years YEP and noting the costumes, music and dances that were used for them. soon we will begin planning what we will do this year (some of the kids are already absolutely set on dressing as Elsa and singing songs from Frozen, but that probably wont work for the whole class).

We have also been discovering that various everyday objects can be turned into instruments (there are a couple of videos on Seesaw). Soon we will begin making our own.