Drawing pictures from our favourite books
ur first journal for this week is going to tell a story about everything that we did in class today. We know that we usually do this however today was a a day filled with many books and stories. We had two activities to do with our teachers that we have not done before. The one was a cutting and pasting activity and the other one was a looking and drawing and writing activity. Our teachers like to challenge us as they know how capable we are.
Jumping, hopping, bending our knees, opening our legs wide and bending one knee at a time from side to side, putting our hands above our heads and reaching in be-tween our legs and stretching back like a banana, stretching to the sides as well, swinging our arms clockwise and anti-clockwise, shaking our legs and arms were all a part of our warm up exercises for our gymnastics class. As always, Miyashita sensei divided us into two groups when we do his class with the groups sitting opposite one another. After gymnastics, we sat with Hisami and did some meditation. She used a buddha statue that has a light inside that changes colour. We enjoy the calmness of our yoga and meditation times with her, each week.
The reason why we did meditation and no yoga today was because it was Anika’s Show and Tell. “Show and Tell, Show and Tell, today is Anika’s, Show and Tell”. She brought along a beautiful silver necklace with a turtle hanging from it. She told us that her mum also has one like it and that she bought it when she and her family went travelling. She said that she couldn’t remember the name of the place where she travelled to, but…………...it was definitely a beach. Thanks for bringing your beautiful necklace to show us, Anika!
When we counted ourselves this morning, Ai chan used the pointer finger and touched us on our shoulders as she counted 16 friends in attendance. It felt like such a small class today because usually we are 19 friends which makes the class much busier and fuller.
Kindness was a focus in our day as it is one of the values that we are learning about. Shelley asked us: How can you show kindness to others? What things can you do, that show kindness? These were our thoughts:
Emilie: Help people
Taisei: Hug
William: Share toys
Ava: Give a kiss
Sarah: Giving toys
Alona: Playing together
Natan: Hugging
Kensei: Playing
Temma: Doing a play date
Orion: Going with mommy and daddy and your family somewhere
Ai: Going to somebody’s house and playing together and eating snack together
Liezel: Helping friends when they need help
Kai: If someone is sick, helping them to see that they are safe and making soup for them.
Ohana families have shown special kindness to Orion’s family recently. Orion told us that his sister Verity has been sick in hospital and the families at Ohana International School wanted to know what they could do, to help Orion’s family. They decided that they would make dinner for Orion, his mum, his dad and his Mimi for a few days. We also learnt that his mum, Clare is vegetarian so she will get some special meals without meat or fish. We thought that this was very kind indeed. This is true kindness! The next thing that came out of our discussion was, how can we draw kindness? Maybe we can draw some of the things that we spoke about and maybe we can have some other thoughts. When we were discussing this, we actually thought about changing our OHANA LEARNING TREE into a KINDNESS tree. What a great idea! So we set about taking off all the things that we had chosen to display on OHANA LEARNING TREE. Someone said that we could use letters to display our kindness thoughts, and someone thought about apples. Our teachers said that we can choose whatever we want for our own personal kindness display.
Hisami and Liezel sat with us for another interesting activity today. The cutting one! Before we started cutting out shapes, we each took a magazine and looked for a picture that we liked. Once we had found our picture, we tore the whole page out of the magazine and our teachers drew lines on it; at many different angles. There were straight lines, curved ones, angled ones etc. We cut the entire picture into pieces and then there was another challenge. This time, we had to try and put the pieces together like a puzzle. We pasted the picture directly into our workbooks/portfolios. This activity involved many skills; se-lecting a picture after turning pages which is a fine motor skill and involved eye hand co-ordination. Then we cut along the lines which is a manipulative skill again involving fine motor co-ordination and eye hand co-ordination. Putting the puzzle together is a visual perceptual skill that requires shape recognition. So in one activity we worked on developing many skills. Challenging activities make us feel tired even though we love being challenged by our teachers each day.
Thanks for a wonderful start to our OHANA GIVES BACK week.
OXOXOXOXO
Flowers Class children