Those bones look like a crab!

Today we had another big welcome. This time it was to our new friend Noa and her family. Noa’s name sounds the same as Noah who already comes to Ohana however he is a boy and she is a girl. If you look really carefully at their names you will see that he has an “h” at the end of his name and she doesn’t. This is what makes their names different even though they sound the same when we say them. Noa had a lovely day with us and she did some beautiful drawings on her place mat. She drew two people and some flowers and decorations. She told us that the one person was her mum and the other was Noa! She also decorated a star for Jamie’s birthday which we are going to celebrate on Monday. During our morning circle we all sat together and Tokutaro spent his day upstairs with all of us. He is the only student who comes to the second floor on a Friday and he is so competent that he was able to do everything that we did upstairs. He already knows how to lay his table for snack and lunch time; how to pack things away after these routines and he sits and reads books and listens to story as if he was four or five years old. Our teachers are amazed, and so are we, at his competence and ability to do so many things and he is not yet two years old.

We sang “Everybody tapping”; “When you’re happy and you know it”; “There are seven days in a week”; “Sunday Monday” and the freeze song. Noa laughed so much when we were doing the freeze song. She was pretty good at keeping still and “freezing” when the music stopped. We corrected all the information on our calendar and everyone had a turn or sometimes two, to do something. When Shelley sang the song about the days of the week, we always laugh as she makes it so obvious which day it is today! She sings all the days of the week really softly and then when it comes to today, she uses a deep, loud voice and we always guess correctly. We have to find the word that sounds different! During library time we sat and read books. Many of us like to go into the library when it is free play time as we enjoy the atmosphere in the room and we love looking at books and having stories read to us. We read “Knuffle Bunny Too” today and we love seeing the Knuffle Bunnies getting mixed up at the end of the day. We think that it was great that Sonya and Trixie became the best of friends. Jamie and Noa shared the white board at the beginning of the day. Darren drew a line down the middle and one side was just for Jamie to draw on and the other was only for Noa. Noa drew some Hiragana which is Japanese writing and we thought that she is really good at writing Japanese; and she is only four years old.

Darren showed us the mannequin again today and he made different poses with it. Each time we had to work out what he was doing. Finn loves it when he raises his arms and always says: “He is getting ready for snack time”. One of the poses looked like he was “running to school”; another one looked like he stood still. We will use him as a guide when we need to do actions next week and try to copy him. We drew pictures of people on pages while Noa did her place mat and star. We also looked at xrays on the light table when we arrived at school this morning. Jamie thought that one of them looked like a crab. Our teachers think that he was talking about the pelvis! Wishing you all a great weekend and see you on Monday with our new friend Sophie Gertler.

Love Shelley, Darren and Sabine