Colourful alphabet soup

I think I have said this before, but I love my big blackboard (even though it's green), especially because it's magnetic and we can do cool stuff like this - fridge magnet letter soup!

To be sure, my very little learners are nowhere near letter recognition yet - we've only just started our learning journey together! No, I wanted us to get our hands on stuff, move around, share, negotiate and organise.

So that is exactly what we did. A grand time to work with mummy as well, whilst at the same time becoming a little bit independent - venturing out of arm's length. The to & fro of this discovery exercise building confidence and earning praise many times over. Some letter names were used, and some numbers too, but our prime target was colours...and I think you'll agree we ended up with a very colourful board :)

Maybe next time we will do some shape matching, or match up a few big & small letters...we'll see.

Our very young learners - a treat 2011

We have had a wonderful time together this year, every Tuesday and Friday - sniffles, coughs and bugs notwithstanding!  As I browsed through our albums I realised it looks like we spend a lot of time outdoors...well, we're lucky to live in such a beautiful place, and Luna is nicely located for the castle, river, parks and other zones fit for adventure and exploring minds.



Eriko-sensei has been ever cheerful and ready for hugs, and usually beating me to work even though she lives so far away. Our children have emerged from mummies' protective arms and wails of tears every morning, to sharing and self-aware young big people!

The highlights? Well, let's see:

• Ceilidh ripping the wings of a cicada was pretty shocking (it had ventured into the classroom though!).
• Shige mastering My First Scrabble
• Going trainspotting at the station and riding on the bus
• Eating all our lunch and tidying up nicely
• Playing together gently and taking turns
• Being really helpful and favouriting the "Clean Up" song

As the slideshow says (it is a bit long at 5 minutes, but how else can you celebrate 9 months of growing up?) we wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and all the very best for 2012. The Year of the Dragon. Exciting!

Fresh air - can't beat it!

Our little walk to the new D2 hardware store was not a success - not the right kind of ink - so we made a sortie to Watahan. The benefit for our pre-schoolers here is the large fish tanks we can go 'wow' at. We can also try to find the gerbils and hamsters in their cages, but they are starting to thing about hibernating and hiding under their newspaper & cabbage leaves. The rabbits are too big to hide - and the dogs have nowhere to do anything, which is sad. But, they love jumping around when the children are there.


Across the road (once we'd found the ink) is the nice new park with all the swings and slides, and lots of open grass to run around on. It is still not too cold in the sunshine, and we ran around all the attractions twice over. Beats being indoors, again!

There were lots of other children there (and Jim even had to rescue one of a tall ledge!) with the same idea, so we had to wait for a turn (which is good to learn!)

Finally, we enjoyed a nice sunny picnic with lashings of fresh air. A very healthy pre-school day!

We're going on a ....castle hunt

Yes, I have to admit that location sometimes trumps everything.

Pre-school this morning, and one of our trademark fabulously cloudless early autumn skies on display...the mountains marking the skyline beautifully and just a hint that the trees are starting to turn. What would you do?!

Well, we went through the motions for a little while, but after snacktime the day really was looking to inviting to ignore anymore! Hats on, jackets on, shoes on - let's go on a castle hunt! And what would you know, we found one about half a mile from Luna. It's black, and over 400 years old. Today, the workers were preparing the grounds for the soba matsuri coming this long weekend - it will be rammed! Can you really do a long weekend based on buckwheat noodles? (Personally, will be yelling at England to beat Les Frogs in New Zealand!)

We had a picnic under a tree, then nearly fell into the moat with the fish (submarine-sized). On the way back, sleep attacked the weary walkers and we had a nice little nap time together :) That is the recipe for a very jolly day!

Cleaning up at Luna

 Observant readers will notice a common thread in these pictures, namely, cleaning up! This is the first song my son ever learned...and I am at a total loss to explain how come.

Whenever we go anywhere, he hunts for a brush, broom or vacuum cleaner and starts doing the rounds. If he can't find anything, he'll grab a stick or a pole, and get busy. Failing that, a cloth and he'll get down on hands and knees for a few laps. The action shot here is at pre-school in Luna, where the alphabet soup is getting the treatment.

Tiny hoons

Before we had all the rain from the typhoon, our plants were looking a bit jaded, so we got the boys to give them a drink. But, the scooter was in much more need of a clean, apparently! As you can see, no nook ignored. The boys also gave themselves and us a hosing down, just for fun :)

On the graded reader

Even reading time becomes an opportunity to tackle dust and cobwebs (we vacuum the joint before & after each day's pre-school!) and if not allowed, a sit down protest. We never did get to the end of the story, but the book is really clean - I think!

Key words

During a snooze break in pre-school, I found a new toy to fiddle around with my photos on my iPhone. This is unusual - I usually fall asleep as well, ha! ha!

Room to grow

 We were just messing around on Friday, in pre-school, crayons and scraps of paper. Shige was busy drawing his hands, then his feet (think his mum will be happy he took his socks off first)!

Simple is best, and I think this effort a tad spiritual?

Which is odd, as I am not a spiritual kind of guy. I love everything this little picture says though.

Time to sink in

 It has been ages since we played My First Scrabble - mostly because we couldn't find the boxes!

What a difference a couple of months make! Last time we had tantrums and 'can't do it/won't do it' shenanigans - snatching, pushing, and hiding tiles.

We also had the rawest guesses about the words we were making before...today, Hinata especially literally flew through the words, choosing the correct letters regularly and begging for the next card! Sota hasn't been with us as long, but he too was putting sounds in order to solve the puzzles.

As you can see, the puzzle is colour coded, matching the tiles required. This makes scanning 26 letters much less challenging - the tiles are still in order so players get used to the run of letters without having to start at the beginning again, every time they look up. Finding a /t/ sound from 5 orange letters is much more manageable than rummaging a jumble of the entire alphabet. And the children were matching sounds to letters, saying the words suggested by the picture prompts, rather than relying on the names of the letters. A subtle but important difference!

Animal Adventure - our game on Voicethread

In pre-school this morning we had fun playing an animal adventure board game, and I thought you'd like to hear how well our team could play! (They were very patient while Jim messed around on the computer - thank you guys!)

We love Voicethread for this kind of interaction between students, as it gives them a real sense of achievement & ownership. It is also a wonderful chronicle for them to cherish. Real Player also allows you to download/convert to eg iPhone, which is pretty funky!

Would love to hear your comments...add them. Follow this link (couldn't load to Blogger for some reason today).

Pre-school avatars : )

Access our resources on and offline

In pre-school we are often using new flashcards, and sometimes mummies don't know what they are! We are going to share our materials through Edmodo this year, with each class having its own 'room'. All our classes will have exclusive access to the materials, songs, pictures, recordings, drawings, board work they have used in their class, every week.

We are making 2011 our year to share more of our materials with our students. One way we do this is through the site called quizlet. Check out the flashcards we used today with our pre-schoolers for the sound /b/ here. Notice you can hear the word if you click on the speaker icon next to the picture.


Try /d/ with this:

Choose a Study ModeScatterLearnFlashcards

Study these flash cards | Study english flash cards

Try this for the /g/ sound:

Choose a Study ModeScatterLearnFlashcards

Study these flash cards | Study english flash cards

If you want to see what else you can play with, search for sets made by "lunateacher" or "LunaJim".
If you have a smart phone, you should be able to download them to your device and play with them offline.

I say to you Mr. Gorbachev - paint this wall, kids!

Such a beautiful day - would have been criminal to stay indoors! It was chilly though, and still a frost in the shade when I walked up to school first thing. Hats & woollies order of the day.

Our primary mission this morning was to find some paint brushes - to the hardware store then. We found all sorts of things before that though. Bicycles of all shapes & sizes - we even tried a couple out for size. Soft & smooth carpets as well as rough ones. Colour pencils of the rainbow. And finally brushes.

Yesterday the chippy put a partition wall up, blocking us out of our old large room (and now I realise the light switch for our corridor too!). Apparently they'll remove the freight lift as well, which has never been used & must weigh a ton or more). It's an ugly grey, plasterboard thing. Mmm. If they are going to rip our precious school to bits, we may as well enjoy ourselves - sound like a plan? Yeah, thought so too!

We are lucky Naomi-sensei is an artist. She is Michael Angelo to Jim's whim - "scenic rabbits & stuff". Jim did 'sky', while she created an idyllic landscape which the children quickly started colouring - crayon so we could paint over with bigger colours later. And did we colour? Fish, rabbits, goats, owls, fruit, mountains, trees, squirrels.

I think they fleshed out my inspiring 'thought' brilliantly, don't you? It's a tremendous bit of graffiti (can we take it with us??? Somehow think there's be a pick axe coming through it in January. Never mind - can we create? Yes, we can!

The remainder of our pre-school day was marked with green/blue hands, and a large amount of time under the table in Tana's room. It is very cluttered with 'stuff', so it was a nice hidey-hole where we could read a couple of books & lace buttons.

Highlight really was our masterpiece though - we autographed it with palm prints, just in case it is worth a few quid!

What's the time Mr. Wolf? Time for some fresh air!

A tool I found during the weekend and can even do on my iPhone (I think - haven't tried yet).

 What do you think of it so far? Worth $5 a month?

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Comments please!

Snapdragons & very basic origami

 We are getting to the stage in the year when we are having to keep the windows closed, and limit excursions outside to nice sunny days. Tis getting a tad chilly. The evenings are drawing in as well, which seems to subdue everyone. Chins up folks -cool things will be happening at Luna in the next couple of months.

This afternoon our pre-schoolies needed some chill time of their own - had  a busy morning squeezing first letter sounds into heads, and lunch was a bit of a stand up/sit down saga!

Colouring things can be a waste of time; I usually much prefer to make colouring activities listening or reading based. It strikes me as odd though to instruct children what colour certain things should be. For instance, Japanese people rarely see green apples (and if they do, they are 'blue' anyway)...they 'should' be red. The little green men to help you know when it is safe to cross the road? They are 'blue' too, as well as the traffic lights. Children have vivid imaginations, it goes without saying. Nice to give them the scope to express that. As they worked, they chatted (unfortunately in L1) & commented on each others' work - 'stay inside the lines' or 'don't use all the colours on the gorilla' kind of stuff, as well as family updates & the usual bragging.



We dragged the activity back to a teacher-led thing once everyone was happy they'd coloured every last little bit, and then some. Helter-skelter & psychedelic, monotone and trim, no matter. Task was to fold carefully, corners to the middle. First attempts produced chaos & blubs of 'I can't do it'. Try again and pay attention! Watch me this time too! Folding neatly is a bit of an art, and one we'll need to work on I think. We aren't origama masters just yet - but our snapdragons turned out nicely, and just in time to amaze mummies. Have a nice weekend y'all!

Imperial or metric - and how long is a piece of string?

Luna measurements - NASA accurate!

We went 'old school' today in pre-school - using things readily available to us to measure the other things around us...bit like back in the day before anyone my age knew how long a centimetre (or even a centimeter) was, how heavy a kilogramme (or a kilogram) was....deploy hands, feet, and elbows!

Do you like my castle? Do you?

First off, we drew around our hands from thumb-tip to pinky-tip, in the process Yuki turned Hina's hands green with the marker pen (she was helping out today as Naomi sensei is away in Tokyo)! Then we drew around feet. We quickly photocopied them so we had six of each, for each child - a measuring set. We also managed to solve the "How long is a piece of string?" conundrum at a stroke: it is the distance from your elbow to your finger tip (a cubit, I believe).

Tooled up, we set about measuring our surroundings. The table we were sitting at, the jigsaw we had done first thing, and the castle we'd built for snack-time. We jotted down our results and noticed something quite odd - our results were not the same. Why? Maybe we are different sizes? We tested this theory on Yuki's feet and hands - much bigger than the children's. Jim's were even bigger - the biggest in fact.

"Six feet tall" Luna Giants!

We measured each other - from head to toe and from finger-tip to finger-tip. According to this survey our three year olds are approximately 7 feet tall :) and I'm about 4 yards across the chest (getting there!)

While our results then were not the most scientifically sound you'll ever see, they were cast-iron true for our kids today. Stimulated them to think about which things are bigger or smaller, longer & shorter etc - and have a way of proving if these ideas are true/false.

I know what a foot is (I've got one or two), and a yard - three feet...what was the premise for a centimetre?!

Our neighbourhood

This month in pre-school we are going to be talking about our neighbourhood, so we thought it would be a good idea to get our shoes on and have a little look around.


The first thing we did after the hot summer (it was too hot to venture out, really) was rediscover our river, which is only a trickle at the moment. We disturbed a heron, and from the bridge we could see what he was looking for. Brown fish. We didn't see any ducks, or the troll (he lives under the bridge, eats frogs and mice, and isn't very nice!). We saw spiders, butterflies, dragonflies, dandelions, and grasshoppers.

We found a truck with some workmen repairing wires overhead. They had hard-hats on, uniforms, and safety shoes. Opposite, were some men fixing a house. They also had hard-hats on, but soft plimsoles for gripping the scaffolding they were putting up.And baggy purple pants.

We found a lot of uncollected rubbish in red plastic bags (today is 'burnable day') - everyone has to put their name on their rubbish, can you believe.


We saw a stupid lad racing around on his noisy motorbike wearing shorts & a t-shirt ("He'll learn", said Jim), and some old people driving very carefully. At the barber's we found a lot of tomatoes, and we saw a recycling warehouse full of newspapers. We couldn't find a toilet at the little temple, so we had to scamper back to Luna! A big, black dog barked at us.

Lunch was a very busy time today - everyone got the call of nature so Jim & Naomi barely had time (nor the appetite!) to eat. Would you like to see what Japanese pre-school kids have in their lunch boxes? Jim is very jealous of the Thomas knife, fork & spoon set one of the children has!

A lovely day, finished off with a big book about the fruit we like - so energised they actually dived into the big bag of plastic fruit we had ready! Obviously, "We like fruit"!

Sota in September

We welcomed Sota to our little coven called pre-school last Friday, and a torrid time did he have. My oh my. Never actually seen a child wail themself to sleep before. Poor lad was distraught when mummy left. AS I was the only person he knew, he was naturally dangling from my neck most of the day - only really letting go to join in a run around towards the end of our day. He promised to come back today and play with "Thomas" - train bonkers - today.



For sure we had a few tears again this morning, but didn't last long, quickly joining in with the girls in their new challenge - finding matching pictures and circling them. He quickly got the hang of that and we all settled down to a number of tricky pics!



Everyone is doing really well in their bathroom training - only trouble is when everyone decides they want to go at the same time! Bit difficult to prioritise three year-old claims of urgency! Neither do we want to rush things along - very important they get the space & time they need to start managing this function. All in all, I think they are coping very well (touch wood, OK?).

First & final sounds - and a tummyache

Another mind-melting day up here in the high hills...don't know why I am always so surprised by the intensity of the heat here. Twenty years and still one the wiser!


Our pre-schoolers started thinking about initial and final sounds today - does a particular sound start a word, or finish it? I have realised that getting 'in' with phonics before their brains are pulped with ridiculous katakana and all the implications that has for poor, bad, mis- and mal-pronunciation, intonation, stress & timing is a wonderful bonus: I don't have to unteach much (OK, maybe parents muddy the water a bit, but nothing systematic at this early age.)

 Important - dealing with the sounds letters represent, not the 'names' of them.  And be consisitent. Pointless if you are going to introduce 'ice cream' as part of your set for single /i/ sound. Think about it - or say "ice" a few times. It does not start with the same sound as {iguana, igloo or  insect}, does it?!


Likewise, we are not talking about spelling. Words like {dog, bag & log} all in in a hard /g/ sound....but so do {vague, league & plague}. Worry about pointing out the challenges actual spellings provide learners with later!

Getting ahead of ourselves a bit there. All our pre-schoolers needed to do was pay attention, best as possible in the heat, and decide if a sound we were focusing on began a word or finished it , and then to colour the picture of the word one of two colours - then all the words beginning with the sound are all the same colour, and all the words ending with it are another. Then maybe we can see a link. Teacher (pre-writing as yet) writes the letter under the picture to the left, or to the right. Which? Let you think about it!


Today's new game was 'Around the houses', which I described in detail a day or two ago. This followed up our first proper turn taking game 'Tummy ache' from Tuesday. Turn-taking, passing things, remembering where you were on the board & which way you were going...and having to put up with something you don't like eg Not having a hissy-fit just because you got boring milk while your nemesis got grape Fanta!

Best part of the game = kids teaching Naomi sensei, who came back from her Tokyo studies today and noticed how much we've all grown!

Big Books, little readers

Show YOU are interested!

Action shots of Jim in action in the classroom are few & far between; Yuki is always pestering me for them though for promotion materials etc. So, seeing as she was helping out in pre-school today (Naomi off studying in Tokyo), she snapped away happily while I was reading one of our lovely BIG Scholastic readers ("I like").

Be active

Obviously (as I think it is obvious!) readers need to be interactive and engaging; milk the book for all it's worth and personalise it for maximum impact! In this case picking out the fruit we do like - and the fruit we don't like. Which fruit did we eat already today? Which fruit is soft/hard, what colours are they etc.

Most importantly of all, know your story!

As you can see, our pre-schoolers thoroughly enjoy a good book, and it is a lot of fun getting so much back from the children. I would say they are producing more spoken English now, before their 3rd birthdays, than most of our pre-teens who can only come to class once a week.

Engage

All the language they are acquiring at this age is going 'in', and being reproduced extremely naturally, frequently, and in context - with no pressure to perform.