The gigantic cube

Today is the last day of August and tomorrow will be a new month. We are looking forward to some cooler weather as we go slowly into Fall/Autumn and then we will be able to stay outside for longer periods of time in the park. Today it was so hot that our hair looked wet just as if we had been putting water on our heads. Today we played with a huge fun shape in the park. Shelley usually carries the park bag that is filled with mostly sand toys and some balls and today Darren carried two small bags. One was red and one was black. Mmmmmmm, you may be wondering! What was inside? Well, when we arrived at the park, Darren opened up the bags and he took something big and colourful out of the red bag and from the black bag, he took out a machine that blows air. He put a pipe inside the colourful “thing” and we helped put the machine on. It made quite a noise and we watched as the colourful “thing” filled with air and ………………it became a gigantic cube. We punched  it in the air; we pulled it; we jumped on it and had so much fun. Almost all of us took a tumble or two while we were playing with it, but we got up and carried on screaming and having a great time, as you can see from the photos. We had to be careful as we couldn’t see where we were going when we were pushing it or chasing it so our teachers had to guide us so that we played with it in a safe place. We even tried to roll it down the huge slide so that it landed in the sandbox. While we were chasing the gigantic cube Nico was climbing on the climbing frame with Kana and he had a great view of us playing with the cube.

Our teachers wish that the surface in the park was more “child friendly”. They would relax more when we are playing in this way. We had fun!

During our morning circle we played a game that involved colour recognition and visual memory. We had different containers each filled with a variety of collage materials e.g. red, green, yellow, orange and blue. They were all hidden underneath a towel. Our teachers placed them on the floor in a row and then asked us to close our eyes and we had to guess which one was missing. This was a bit difficult in the beginning and then we realized how to play the game. After this Darren took his remote control and we had turns to give our friends and teachers instructions as to what action or movement, they should do. We stood; we swam; we sat; we ate ice cream slowly and then we ate it quickly; we swam on our backs. We laughed a lot when we were told what to do. We also counted how many teachers and children were at school today.

We followed on our game about colours at the activity table and we made beautiful collages using different coloured collage materials. They will be on display in the classroom when they are dry. We spent some time in the library and all enjoy sitting and choosing books and reading to ourselves. Of course we love listening to stories too and today our story was “Bertie and the Bear”. It was a story about a bear that followed a boy called Bertie who was followed by a king and a queen and a man playing the drums and a man playing the trumpet etc. In the end the bear started to do cartwheels and balance on his head and dance. We think the he loved music just like we do!

Thanks for a great day at Ohana today.

Love Shelley, Darren and Kanako