It's a small world filled with songs and love

Before our party started we went upstairs to the office to play there so that our parents could find their places in the classroom first. We had a line to stand on and they sat opposite us, so we knew where we were sitting. We listened to a story about “Wally the whale” and Hisami did some exercises and breathing to keep our bodies quiet inside. We walked down the stairs and then sat on the stairs until almost all of our mums and a few dads had arrived. We enjoyed the entire party and were relaxed and happy.

Our end of the year party was a huge success and we were so grateful that our parents were able to come and see us “in action”. We learnt the words of the songs and combined them with specific actions to, create a beautiful kaleidoscope of songs from around the world, that we know. We would like to thank our teachers for their endless patience in preparing us for the event and for their commitment to teaching us, loving us and caring for us during the past year.

We are connected through the fact that while we come from different parts of the globe, we all live in Tokyo, Japan and go to Ohana International School. Love is something very precious that also connects us and we are grateful for the love of our parents and teachers each and every day. You can see why we sang “Love is something”.

We were so happy at the end of our party and our tummies were so full that we didn’t want to eat lunch early. We played on the floor while our teachers put all the furniture back into the classroom and then Hisami read a story to us about the “Very Hungry Caterpillar”. At the end of the story, Dev told us that the butterfly’s baby is called a caterpillar. He remembered this from the book “Monkey Puzzle” that tells the story of a monkey looking for his mummy. Hisami took out her tin that is filled with exciting things and we remembered that there were some vegetables hiding inside. There was a cherry, lotus root, onigiri, carrot, shitake mushroom, and burdock. We first made a regular sized obento box for us to eat. Then along came an elephant so we had to make an enormous obento box and then when a mouse came along, we made a teeny tiny obento box.

Our parents were extremely generous as always with the food that they made for our snack. You can see from the photos. Pooja impressed us all with a lovely pot of flowers and the flowers were cupcakes. Yummmm!  It looked so beautiful, we wanted to eat the cookies but we didn’t want to spoil the arrangement. Eventually we did eat them and there were some left over so we offered the teachers in the other classes. They too didn’t want to spoil the arrangement.

One of the songs that we sang at our party was called “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” and we sang it in English, Japanese and Chinese. We sang it in a magical way because our teachers switched the lights off and we all wore bracelets that lit up in the darkness. It was so beautiful. We did it again later in the day. There were so many colours it was like a real rainbow.

We also want to thank Yuki for giving us each a farewell present at the party. We will miss him when he goes to another school next year but we are happy that he will come to Ohana summer school.

Our teachers loved their gifts and messages from us and we feel so lucky that they will be our teachers in Flowers Class next year. Yay!

Thank you to everyone for an amazing end to our school year. Let’s enjoy the last two days together.

Love all the children in Petals Class.