Unit of Inquiry

Our next sense was taste.  We learned that our tongues help us taste, and we are able to identify different types of taste – sweet, salty, sour, and spicy.   The experienced learners already knew sweet and salty, and they were interested in learning new words – bitter and bland.  Surprisingly, even after eating 85% chocolate and plain yogurt, they insisted on categorizing the chocolate and yogurt as “sweet”.

After an introduction to the different tastes, we had a blind taste test.  Most were able to guess correctly, but there were a few tricky tastes like sour, spicy, bitter, and bland.  We also did a second taste test – this time, they were dissolved in water. We had salt water, sugar water, lemon water, and gochujang water, and added cocoa water, plain yogurt and peach flavored yogurt for the older ones to reinforce their learning of bitter and bland.

For our final activity with our tastebuds, we made our own flavored water! We used lemons, oranges, strawberries, yellow peaches and pineapples.  We call it “fruit water” because we put fruits in the water. We made our fruit water the day before and let it sleep for one night.  The next day, our fruit water was ready! We took a few sips of our own fruit water.  Some of us found it yummy, and some of us found it not so yummy. Some of us thought they tasted sweet, and some of us thought it tasted sour.

Art

Mother’s Day is coming soon, so we made some handprint flowers.  We traced our own hands, then colored it.  We finally made our own flowers with stickers.  It was interesting to see everyone’s version of a flower.

Play

First we started off our play at the park with with some Ninja Training to work on our gross motor skills.

The Hanging Chains was the most difficult obstacle we experienced. Climbing up was a little difficult because it moved a lot.

Our 2nd and 3 year friends did a lot of Ninja Training last year. This was the obstacle we found challenging, so many of us avoided doing it, but this year we tried to challenge it.

For our 1st year friends, we were not expecting them to climb across the obstacle. We were hoping that they could just climb up, hang on for a bit, then climb down, but they all wanted to climb across just like their older friends. They all were able to complete the obstacle with some help.

After our Ninja Training, we went to the wading pool or じゃぶじゃぶ池.  It was finally running after being turned off for the past 2 years due to Covid 19.

As soon as the training was done, everyone instantly ran into the water to play. They went up and down the river together looking for leaf boats to float in the water.

There were a few friends that preferred not to get wet, but after 15 minutes or so, everyone was inside the wadding pool walking around and splashing each other.

Outing Day

This week’s outing day was a wet day.  It was very cloudy and lightly raining off and on.  We walked all the way to Mabashi Park.  There we played on the equipment for a bit before running over to the wadding pool.  We took off our shoes and jumped inside.  We were already wet from the rain, but jumped in the water and got soaked.