Welcome back to school for the spring term

We welcomed our new friend, Akari, this morning and we think that she had a lovely first day at Ohana. She loved playing in the dress up corner and happily went to the activity table to make her place mat for snack and lunch time. When we sat down for lunch all of us had a place mat but we will let you into a little secret; we didn’t use a place mat for snack time. Can you guess why we didn’t use our place mat for snack time? Hmmmmm……..we didn’t have snack inside our classroom today. We went to the park and had snack time underneath a cherry blossom tree. It was such a wonderful day and the perfect day for having a cherry blossom picnic. We hope that we can play in the park or see some more cherry blossoms because they look just like pom poms…all full and fluffy. When we walked back from the park, we looked at one of the small stores along the way and noticed that one of them had a large pom pom hanging from their doorway. We love the word “pom pom” and Shelley taught us a new song today about two little bees:  

“Two little bees one day, sat on a big grape vine

Said the one little bee to the other little bee

Is your pom pom bigger than mine

Is your pom pom, is your pom pom

Is your pom pom bigger than mine

Is your pom pom, is your pom pom

Is your pom pom bigger than mine?”

We laughed when she sang it to us and then we wanted her to sing it over and over. When we came back from the park, we asked her to sing it with three little bees, and then ten little bees, and then twenty little bees and more.

You can see from the photos here that the trees in the park were in full bloom. While we were in the park, we collected cherry blossoms that had fallen from the tree. Our teachers put them inside books so that they could flatten them and we can then use them for one of our activities tomorrow. We spoke a lot about the cherry blossoms and things in nature today. While we were in the park, we saw flying bugs, crawling bugs and other insects.

During the morning, we spent time in small groups and one of them sat with Shelley at the table doing puzzles with matching double consonant sounds. We looked at the pictures and then chatted about their initial sounds as well as listening for the second sound. Usually when we do puzzles we look at the shapes of the pieces however we focused more on the sounds today and then matched the shapes. The second game we played at the table focused on classifying and categorizing. We had five cards to choose from viz. sea creatures, pond life, toys, insects and snow. We matched 3D objects onto our cards and then each of us had a turn to be the teacher. We named the objects on our cards using full sentences and then we asked our friends to close their eyes. While their eyes were closed, we took one object away and then said: “Open your eyes” and our friends had to guess which one was missing. We swopped cards many times and played the game many times too. It was so much fun and we were able to remember what was missing, every single time.

When we returned from the park, we stood together and looked at the cups with coloured water inside them, that we had left on the shelf from last term. We couldn’t believe it but the liquid had gone down. We started off with the liquid being right up to the black line on the cup and when we looked at them today, the liquid was lower than the black line. We poured the coloured liquid into the filters to see what would happen and noticed that the liquid went into the filter but then it came out of the bottom. We have added our conversation about this to our documentation which is on the wall in our room.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel