I am a little flower

Today was another day where we stayed indoors because of the weather and…………….not only was it a rainy day, it was so cold, almost as if winter came back to Tokyo. Brrrrrr! It feels like there is snow nearby and we hope that it stays away from Ohana International School so that we can come to school tomorrow and we can go outside and play in the park. We had plenty of things to do, especially activities at the tables which took a long time. We used our stripy black and yellow paintings as a background for creating our garden collages. We had many discussions during the day about gardens and what we usually find in a garden. Gardens are filled with many wonderful things from nature and some of the things that we thought of were bees, flowers, grass, trees, butterflies, ants, apple tree, snail, worm, leaves, branches and seeds. We played a game called “Concentration”. We chant “Concentration, elimination, Keep the rhythm, keep the rhythm to the beat Subject………” You can choose whatever subject you want to and then everyone in the circle tries to think of something related to the subject. We started off with “Colours” and all of us said a colour. We try to think of a word that hasn’t been said before. Our next subject was “Parts of the body”. This was a little more challenging but it was made a little easier because we were all standing up and we could look at one another’s bodies for clues. The last one we did was garden and this is when we thought of all the things that we think you can find in a garden. We named the different things and then Shelley drew pictures of all these things on the white board in our classroom. We then curled up into tiny little seeds and listened carefully to the words of the song “I am a little flower”. We grew into beautiful flowers and then chose a partner and danced together. We did this twice and laughed when we were holding hands with our partner, dancing.

When we were sitting at the activity table with our yellow and black stripy backgrounds, we had a large selection of collage materials which our friends had chosen when they were working there. They chose coloured matchsticks, coloured paddle pop sticks, little plastic shapes, coloured foam shapes, paper, shiny sparkly sprinkles, patty pans in different colours and patterns, buttons and thread. We chatted about what we wanted to make and thought carefully how to use the materials and what we wanted to use them for. Usually our teachers let us do free collage but today they wanted us to focus more on what we have been learning about and try to create something within this theme. When we sat two at a time with our teachers this worked well.

Some of us made strips for the grass and some of us snipped green paper to make ours look like grass. Our dioramas are a big project and today Hisami sat with each of us and we chose paper for the sky and the ground. Hisami asked us what we wanted to put inside our dioramas because our teachers want us to create our own unique ones. They can have whatever we want to make, inside them. Of course, some of the things will be the same but some things will be different as well.

Our teachers in Petals Class are great at recycling and the backgrounds for our dioramas are paper towels with designs on them that we made last year using coloured dye. We smoothed double sided tape onto them and then chose which colour blue we wanted for the sky. We will continue working on them for a while as our teachers needs to sit with us individually as we make them come to life. We went through our calendar and did our morning rituals e. g. our roll call to see who is at school. We have been singing quite a few bee songs but the one that we keep on going back to is……”Two little bees one day…..” and our favourite part of it is when we hear the words ‘pom pom’. We laugh heartedly each time we hear it. Today Shelley changed the words and tricked us and sang “Is your back pack bigger than mine” instead of “Is your pom pom bigger than mine”.

We played a fun game using Shelley’s precious scarf that has a photograph of the beach that she went to when she was a little girl, in Cape Town, South Africa. We all held a part of it and moved it to resemble waves crashing on the shore. It was a special team building time for us as a group. We hope that all of our friends are staying warm and dry on this wintry day in Tokyo. See you tomorrow for another “Day in the Life of Petals Class”. Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel