Lots of children at Ohana

Today was officially Tokutaro’s first day and he settled so beautifully. We noticed that when he came upstairs, he explored the room and discovered some new toys. He played with them and he followed the daily schedule easily. At rest time, he fell asleep with Noah next to him, gently touching his hand. We welcomed Shoko chan back today as well and have not seen her since Summer School. She had a great day with all of us and was really happy when she saw Miya. They have been friends since they were little. Gento also settled well and we separated into two classes for a part of the morning. We did some things together and some things apart and we love our time at school, both ways. When we are together we can learn a lot from our older friends; and our younger friends; and when we work and play separately, we have a great time as well. It is so nice for us to have these choices and opportunities for learning in different ways. Gento, Shoko, Miya and Tokutaro had a busy morning on the second floor. They did dancing to music and then lay quietly on the mat. They like to copy their teachers and their friends so everyone had to lie down on the mat, and then all of them lay together; when they needed to jump, Shelley and Moko had to jump really high so they jumped as well. We all sang a new song in our morning circle. The song goes like this:

(We all sing) Where is ……, where is ……..

(And the person says) Here I am, here I am

(We all sing) Hello….., hello….welcome, welcome!

We all learnt the words and will practice singing it so that in the mornings, we can sing this new song or our “Hello” song from last year. We also sang songs with actions as this helps us concentrate and we love doing action songs. We counted eight children in class today. This was the biggest number of children in class at Ohana since Ohana was born, so it was a great day for us all.

Nico, Finn, Jamie and Noah completed their work in progress which was the large painting of hand and foot prints that they did last week. Today they used sponge stamps in the shape of a smiley face, flower, star, heart, hand and foot. Today they all signed their names in the sign in book which was a great achievement. They copied the letters in their names and will soon be able to write them without looking. Gento, Tokutaro, Miya and Shoko did two activities upstairs. The one was drawing and pasting some shapes onto their placemats which we use for snack and lunch and the second activity was making their hand prints. This was really fun as our teachers paint our hands (and sometimes it is sooooo ticklish) and then we place our hands onto a piece of paper, trying to keep them really still and then we take them off the paper and bingo! Our hand prints are on the paper. They are on display on the board upstairs and there is a small poem next to them all about our hands.

Upstairs we read “Knuffle Bunny” and we learnt how important it is to swap and share toys; which is sometimes really hard for us. We also spoke about faces and looked at the large boy and girl poster that is up on the one window in our classroom. Jamie drew a circle for the face; Noah drew eyes and a nose; Finn drew the mouth and Nico drew ears.

Love Shelley, Darren, Moko and Sabine