Making connections to our creations

Good day, everyone! Hope you all had a great long weekend. It was indeed another beautiful day. The weather was just fabulous. We started our day with our morning jobs and lots of table activities for the day. It was pretty busy in the morning as we were all becoming more and more independent with our responsibilities, and our teachers gave us little supervision.

Table Activities

Our first impression of the classroom atmosphere was that it had amazing materials on the tables. We had some playdough and the utensils placed on the table. We stayed and started to explore the materials as we used the various tools to create new figures.

The second table was filled with twigs, wooden chips, scrap paper, yarn, a glass jar with rice, and many natural materials. Seeing how our friends became so interested and engaged in the activities was great. We’ve created many amazing figures such as boats, fish, and animal models. Of course, with the help of our Ate Liezel, we experimented with these materials. The most popular one we played with was the rice scooping using cups and glass jars. The scooping was a bit challenging, but we managed to transfer the rice from one cup to another.

The third table was filled with painting materials and some canvas we could work on for our exhibition. We also had meaningful conversations while painting away.

Teacher: I wonder what patterns we made on the painting.
Child 1: We are spreading the colors inside the cup. They are bouncing colors. John, you know we went to TeamLab.
Teacher 1: What did you do?
Child 1: We saw the fish, touched it, and went, “BOO!”
Teacher: Did you catch any fish?
Child 1: No, but my brother did.
Teacher: Oh, this is a nice painting!
Child 2: Look! Red paint!
Teacher: Yes, you are right! The red paint created wonderful lines.

They have been mixing the colors and all of a sudden, a song called, “The sky full of stars” by Coldplay was playing in the background. We all sang together, and everyone had a great time.

Circle time

We gathered around after the busy time packing away the toys and free play materials. Our circle time was always filled with music and movement. We began singing our favorite songs with the guitar. One of my friends requested if she could play for the class, and we happily agreed.

Exploration and making connections are the main focus of our topic today, so John brought out some sensory materials we could explore. He took out some pine cones, wooden chips, twigs, gum nuts, and little stones. We talked about the texture and smell of each material. We mentioned that the pine cones smelled like fish and the gumnuts were spiky, and on the other hand, the twigs were long and hard.
Hide-and-seek was a popular game recently, so our teacher asked us to play this kind of game, but with a different twist. Our teachers hid the sensory materials while we closed our eyes. After that, our teacher asked us to find them around the classroom. Our eyes did so well as we found them very quickly and to think that these were small objects, we’re still able to find them and gave them to our teachers.

It was so much fun, and our friends were able to find them. We also read a book called “Lost and Found” by Oliver Jeffers. The story also discussed finding and looking for something or someone we value. They found each other. The penguin and the boy became good friends.

Park time

We went to the park in this beautiful weather. The sun was up, and so we put on sunscreen and mosquito repellant. It was nice to see other classes, and we all had a chance to play with them. Our day is always beautiful with our friends and teachers at Ohana International School.

Lots of love,
All the children from Buds Class 2022