Today was an "I can" day!

It was a quiet day at Ohana with our smallest group of friends and everyone worked and played together really well. It was also a day of many achievements for all of us. For Gento it was an “I can feed myself” day; “I can open and close the markers” day and “I can be gentle with my friends” day. For Finn it was an “I can watch the small children do things that I don’t like and this is okay” day; “I can trace around Nico’s body” day and an “I can make a skeleton” day. For Nico, it was also an “I can make a skeleton” day and most important of all it was an “I can walk up the slide and go down the stairs if the gates at the sand box are locked, to get water at the tap” day! Well done everyone! Gento did his first drawing that we will put in his portfolio. He learnt how to take the tops off the markers as well as place them back on when he was finished. He used a glue stick for the first time at school and was not sure which way to use it in the beginning. He watched Shelley demonstrate and then he enjoyed putting glue onto the paper and placing small pieces of collage on top of it. He then tried to pull the pieces of collage off the paper but the glue had already dried.

He read two books; one was called “My First Book of Words” and the second one was about the ABC. He loves to take the letters off the word wall which is used for the older children in their after school classes and today when he arrived he said “B”. He sang “Twinkle, Twinkle little star” and “Tommy Thumb”.

Nico and Finn learnt about skeletons and parts of the body. There is a small plastic skeleton hanging in the classroom upstairs and you can see bones on one half of it and muscles on the other half. Our bodies are like machines and our brain is its computer. Our brain sends messages to parts of our body so we can do things. We think our brains are quite clever to do this. We made the bones for our skeletons using clay and then Nico lay on the floor and Finn traced around his body. We will use this large drawing for another activity. We sang songs that are related to the body e.g. “Heads and Shoulders” and “Dem bones, dem bones”. The last song is a really funny song as the words in it tell us which bones are joined to one another. We played one of our favourite games which is called “Remote control people”. We do actions using a “remote control” and each of us has a turn to give instructions as if we are the “remote control”. We listen really well in this game! In our circle time upstairs, we went through the calendar thoroughly and we placed all the words and pictures in their correct places. We can’t believe that it is almost the middle of September already.

Gento kun came upstairs before lunch and he sat with us when we were talking about hands.. Darren read us a story called “Hands are not for hitting”. It tells us what hands are for and it also reminds us that hands are not for hitting. Some of the things that it says hands are for are hugging, playing, drawing, holding, washing and holding our toothbrush when we brush our teeth.

We went to the park early this morning which was such a good idea. We were also really lucky because the entire sand box was in the shade, so we spent most of the time playing there.

Love Shelley and Darren