Our new month opened with a new Unit of Inquiry, and with TWO new friends!

The new unit talks about people and places, and especially about cities, and cities in Japan.

When asked, “Where do we live?”, the quickest answer was “JAPAN!” They could also name a lot of other countries both expected (America, China, France…) and surprising (Mongolia, Malaysia, Singapore, Guam…).

“Do we live in TOKYO?” was rapidly answered by, “No, NAGANO!”. Then they named MORE cities in Japan, too. Many Shooting Stars seem to be quite well-traveled! Each of our 4 groups did a good job of putting together a person, a picture and the country name written in English for seven different countries.

From ” UP DOWN RIGHT LEFT!” we started learning that what we see on most maps is ” NORTH SOUTH EAST WEST!”, and we looked at a compass and found that the windows in our room getting bright morning sunshine are facing almost PERFECTLY east.

The rest of the week we talked about what kinds of places and buildings we have in a city, why we have them and what jobs people have who work there.

Halloween is coming at the end of October, and we have started several papercrafts to help decorate for that, using crayons, scissors and glue. You can see them at our Halloween Party!

The next big event will be our Christmas Program, and we decided to do the classic story of “The Elves and the Shoemaker”. Everybody has an important role to play, and we want to add some original ideas of our own to the story.

Two VERY nice surprises this week (in addition to our two new classmates) were a fire truck with 3 fire fighters that stopped by and invited us to see the truck and ask questions about it- as you see in the photo below. And the LAST two photos were of our Friday walk to the park with Milky Way to do dances outdoors, practice basic soccer kicks, and learn the basic throw for frisbees!