Sakura Nursery is my favourite of the Nurseries, without a shadow of a doubt. Its kids are friendly, it’s staff are amazing and it’s set in a really nice place – surrounded by open fields!
So we went there this morning. We began by making Christmas wreaths. These were made of pinecones attached to some wrapped sticks, and then finished with glitter and pipe-cleaners of all sorts of colours. The ones the children did looked great, and it was a pretty fun activity with which to start the day!
Oh, Christmas…
After that it was time to once again head outside to play in the snow 🙂 Me and Brendan began with an attempt to make a Yukidaruma, but unfortunately the snow was too powdery to do so and after about 30 minutes of rolling around the same sized snowball, we gave up. So then, of course, the snowball fighting began 😉 The snowballs which contacted were intrinsically satisfying, especially the ones on the staff 😉
It then turned out that one of the kids was building an ice cave, so we decided to help him! This was pretty great – we cleared it out and made it into a nice little nursery-sized cubbyhole 🙂 However, it was not to last. This same kid then climbed on the roof and collapsed it in! Dreams = crushed 😉
After lunch and a bit of pretending I was going to eat them, we had what would be our last storytime at Sakura Nursery until April. Sakura closes for the first four months of the year for the simple reason that there is no need for it at that point – since the children are all the children of farmers, who have no work between late December and early April, the Nursery closes. Some will go to Toya Nursery, and some will never return to Sakura – we’ll see three of them in the Elementary School come the new school year, however 🙂
Because this is what happens when you put ‘Sayonara’ into Google 😉
The afternoon was taken up largely with lesson planning and travel planning. The Tokyo trip should be fully booked tomorrow with some luck 🙂 It was then time to head to the Gakkodo, where the place turned out to be unusually empty. There were only three children today, and one of them left after only twenty minutes. Of course, this was an opportunity that had presented itself – Kimura-sensei brought out the hotplate from the kitchen and we made pancakes 😀 Unfortunately my attempt at flipping didn’t go so well, but I did at least discover that butter and chocolate are a winning combination! They really are quite excellent together 🙂
After that, we cooked dinner – a nice chicken korma, and the first one to go properly well since I’ve been here. The issue was the bouillon, which is very different to the Oxo cubes of home. You have to use much less of it – so I used strictly 100ml instead of my usual amount which would usually just cover the chicken. So it went well, and it tasted great!
They say that Korma is the boring curry, but when it hits the spot… it really hits the spot!
Finally we rounded out the evening with Kendo. We practiced striking more and we even did a little blocking with shoulder strikes.
Bed beckoned at that point, as it had been a pretty exhausting day!
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