I love cuddles

It was still cold today but the sun was shining so we were fortunate to be able to go and play outside in the park. At one stage, all our friends had left so we had the entire park to ourselves. Shelley didn’t come with us to the park, because she had an appointment and while we were playing outside in the fresh air, she was inside, keeping warm. We have changed our minds about what we will make with our recycled bottle caps. We are going to use them to make a wall mural that we will put underneath our large Ohana sign. So we need many more and want to ask all of our families and friends to please collect colourful bottle tops for us. We sorted them into different colours today and noticed that white is the most popular colour for bottle tops; blue was also popular and we sorted three shades of blue viz. light blue, turquoise and dark blue. All in all we sorted bags with red, pink, light green, dark green, gold, orange, black, dark red, and grey caps. During summer school we will start our project.

William L completed his garden scene and next week Michaela and William B will complete theirs. If you come into our classroom, you will see them on display and it seems that we have a really strong interest in bees and what they do each day. We are singing many bee songs and decided that we would have a nature theme for our “End of Year Party” which will be held in the first week of June. Our “End of Year Party” is a special occasion where we celebrate some of the things that we learnt during our year in Petals Class; and for some of us, say goodbye to Petals Class as we will be going up to Flowers Class in August, for the new school year.

During one of our circle times we changed our calendar and then we played a numeracy game. It was based on the game that we played yesterday at one of our activity tables. We had number symbols, an abacus and magnetic numbers. We chose a number and then counted the beads on the abacus so that we matched the number. Then we looked for the magnetic number that matched. We all had a turn to do this and carefully counted the beads to make sure that we had the correct amount.

Some of us spent time drawing at one of the activity tables. We chose a large piece of coloured paper and Shelley sat with us while we were drawing and she also made a picture. It is always nice for us to have one of our teachers sitting with us, engaged in conversation, drawing and encouraging us to think and plan and socialize while we work and play. Hana drew a picture of Cinderella and the Step Mother, Lanah drew some faces and a dog and Miyu drew a cake, pizza, a dog, a person and many other things. We will work on them tomorrow as well together with some other friends.

We have been singing our new school song each day and are enjoying seeing some of our friends who are able to remember the words. William L can remember many of them and he sings with a lovely sweet voice. We like the song because it really speaks about Ohana International School and what it means to us and what we and our families mean to the school. We will sing the school song at our end of year party.

When we returned from the park we chatted about the calendar and the beginning sound of the word “Thursday”. Thursday starts with the same sound as thank you, thing, think, three and then while it is the same as ‘there’, there has a slight difference. ‘There’ has a strong ‘th’ sound while the other words have a soft ‘th’ sound. We are continually learning initial sounds of words; the middle sounds which help us understand rhyming as well as hard and soft sounds.

We hope that our friends who are not at school for the rest of the week are having fun wherever they are in Japan. See you tomorrow for the last day of this really cold week.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel