January 6 – Welcome back Buds!

After the long holiday, we are all back to where we always like to go to – OHANA! We were greeted by our teachers and we saw that there was a new teacher in our class. He was quite tall but he said hello to us with a big smile, he also said that his name was John. Some of us were a bit nervous seeing a new face while most of us were excited to see our friends again.

We played dressing up and role-playing. We noticed that Karl liked to be an elephant and he always went around the classroom with the big steps as if he was acting how elephants walk. Dominik instantly put on the Spider-man costume and he pretended to climb on the wall in our classroom.

We also missed playing with the toys in our classroom. So, the first thing that we remembered was to look for the toy blocks, lego and some animal toys. On the other hand, Hana and Riku drew pictures with so many colors. Hana said that it was her self-portrait that she was doing. Taiga and Haruto connected various toys and it seemed that they were trying to make a train. Yurika also enjoyed building some lego blocks and it was quite amazing to see how well she did it.

Then, when it was time to clean up, we heard that our new teacher John put out a small thing that can make a sound. We were surprised to hear the sound it made and it was actually quite nice to hear him sing.

“It’s time to clean up, clean up, clean up, everybody clean up.

it’s time to pack away, pack away, pack away, everybody pack away.”

And we really liked what we heard, we started singing with John and everybody packed the stuff away too.

The most interesting part of the day was the music class. We sang some songs about jumping, running and turning around. We also covered the songs we already knew like “ABC song, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Wheels on the bus, Itsy bitsy spider and many more. We had the “Dancing like a Snake” and it was really a fun game. We started singing, shaking our bottoms, dancing and turning, and when the music would stop, we would also stop and go down too. We actually saw that our teachers were full of energy and they all did their very best to make our class feel safe and attended all the time.

We also had some instrument playing; John introduced the small thing that he had. He said that it was a “ukulele”. Hana was very interested and she said if she could touch it. John let us even play with the strings. We were so fascinated by the sound that it made. It has four strings but it can still make a beautiful sound. After that, we also chose the instruments that we like to play. We had tambourines, noise makers or shakers, castanets, small drums and some jingle bells. Riku had the castanets. Yurika picked the tambourine, Rei had a shaker, Dominik had the harmonica, Karl had the recorder, Haruto took the jingle bells and Taiga and Hana played with the drums.

It was a great first day for us in Ohana. We discovered that we can do many things with the music instruments. We also liked the music class together with Sayaka, Maki and John. It was indeed lovely to see all of us dance and sing together. We are looking forward to have more of these activties next time.

Love,

John, Sayaka and Maki