Spring's coming!

Despite the gloomy days that Matsumoto has been having recently, we still believe that Spring is on its way. To celebrate, we have spent the last week pulling, planting, and watering this year's new plants! Thank you to all of our little helpers who have helped us start to plant the seeds to make what will be some very colourful seasons.

Green fingers

Our little mummy & kids class had a very nice surprise this morning...not only are the tomato plants not dead (they were seriously drooping last week after being neglected for the whole of Golden Week) but they were flourishing. Just how much?

Well, this much! We measured them against ourselves, and they came up to our noses! As a little project for the next few weeks we started a table to keep track of how much more they will grow (we will have to stand on each other's shoulders or on a box!), how many flowers they will have, and eventually, how many tomatoes we can harvest.

We will also have to decide what to do with our crop - I really like tomatoes with mozarella & ham as an Italian kind of salad, sprinkled with Balsamic vinegar.

Any other suggestions?

Learning thread

I opened a new bag of letter beads and this amazing strand landed right way up on the carpet.

It's a kind of magic?!?!

The girls made necklaces and bracelets with their names on, after a very creative morning painting our papier mache masks, which have dried nicely.

We also remembered to log the growth of our balcony garden - we water them carefully every morning. We've got tall twisty things climbing up the railings; we've got small round leaves and frail shoots; round leaves, pointy leaves, long leaves; smooth stems and rough ones...and that's just the children!

Seem to be a lot of sleepy, smiley people wandering around this morning, needing coffee or genki drinks to wake them up; big congrats Japan on making the next round in South Africa. One report called them the "Blue Brazil" no less!