Cherry Blossoms

 This week we read A Pair of Red Clogs about a Japanese girl named Mako who ruins her clogs and tries to trick her mother into buying her new ones. Thankfully she realizes her transgression before she commits it and ends up minding her mother. Good decision, Mako!

 

After finding Japan on the map, adding the flag to our collection, and cutting out a girl wearing a kimono, we tried our own version of socks with clogs. I have to say, it's extremely uncomfortable.

 I set up a low table for the kids' lunch. Their kimonos were my sweaters wrapped with karate belts. :) They were also happy to have their water in real tea cups. Don't mind the broken blinds- all part of the future cleanup process with the house!  We also watched a video of a young woman giving a quick Japanese lesson on how to say things like "No way!" and "Wow!"  We tried to use them throughout the day, but I could barely remember it. They are seriously going to have to take any foreign language lessons from someone else.

 To give Hannah a break from flashcards and workbooks, we did some stuffed animal math. I tried to incorporate most things she's learned. They put the animals in sets, added them together, took out 1 out of 4 and did some simple fractions. We sorted them into married couples- haha. That was fun t watch. The kids had different ideas about who would want to be married to whom. The arranged them by "species" and by color- and in this picture, by size. I was surprised how much we could do with this- and it got them really moving as my directions got faster.

 Mako cracks her clog by playing a weather game with the other kids. How the clog lands predicts rain, sun, or snow. (I remember trying to predict things by throwing my stuffed animals around- and who can forget the Magic 8 ball, which I had always let myself believe just a little bit).

 We flipped our own uncrackable flip flops into the grass and predicted all sorts of weather.

 In the book, the illustrator mostly uses black pen and then sparingly uses certain colors, most consistently yellow. The kids tried their hand at this, too. Then we made tissue paper cherry blossom trees. During that, they listened to some traditional music and watched some Gagaku music clips. They loved watching that. We also read 3 other books set in Japan and noticed their similarities- traditional Japanese houses with hardly any furniture and no clutter ( sounds good to me), a love for nature, and one had a great lesson on not listening to what others define as success in life verses what you value most. I especially appreciate that being a musician. I will never be rich or make it big, but there is no greater thrill or more satisfying feeling than working hard to create something beautiful that will fill someone's soul with happiness. You just can't put a price on that.

 Thanks to a friend's suggestion, we took Friday to celebrate the Elevation of the Cross and followed instructions to make crosses from the Garden of the Theotokos. The kids were very happy to have a friend join in on school for the morning.

We had planned on a trip to a Hibachi restaurant, but the prices were pretty steep, and let's face it, if you're going to spend a lot on dinner it's really difficult to watch your kids not eat it. In any case, they were happy with their last activity, which was playing in their own sand (sugar) gardens. Why I bought a 10 lb bag of sugar I have no idea, but we've got plenty of sugar now. It was also a great distraction for the kids while Dax and I discussed more house decisions.

All in all, I was a little afraid that I would essentially be teaching the kids all the stereotypes of Japan verses what it really is today, but once you think about it, it's more important to preserve what is special and unique about a country rather than talk mostly about how modern it can be. And really it's all about exposing the kids to things that are different and wonderful so they can grow on that knowledge later.

Next week was originally slated for a fall unit study. Well, it's not even close to feeling like fall over here so I changed things up and we'll focus on the parts of our face and senses. I have a few fun activities in mind and can't wait to try them out.