Anansi the Spider

Good morning Thursday! The Buds are ready for a new expedition at Ohana. We started the day with a big “good morning” with our friends. Yurika came early today. She waved bye-bye to her daddy and started her day doing the morning jobs. Ritsuka came next and she willingly finished putting away her bag and food for the day. We noticed that there were some paint and pieces of paper on the table. So both of them decided to do the activity for they felt that it was going to be very interesting. And so it was! First, we got our own paper and our teachers told to crumple them before dabbing some paint on it. We had six different colors today. We had blue, yellow, red, green, brown and white. Yurika identified all the colors before she used them. She was using her paintbrush for several minutes and then later switched using her bare hands for painting. Ritsuka was very patient creating a wonderful pattern on her paper. We later opened the paper and saw the cool pattern it made. We tried doing more of that until we had enough. And our teachers told us that we’re going to continue making these patterns next time. Some of us also enjoyed our free play time, Dominik put on his favorite Spider-man costume and he started making some cards for our Moko-sensei. Leanne went to our art table to continue working on our color book. She already knows color blue and she chose the blue crayon to shade on our patterned-paper. Nikolas came in with a big smile again and after doing his morning jobs. He went straight to get his mobile phone and necklaces. He enjoys playing with his dress up materials. He saw the fire truck and moved it around the classroom with “bee-boo, bee-boo, bee-boo” sound. Alexa, on the other hand, showed her “Monster High doll”. She loved holding around the classroom. We also went to our garden upstairs to water the beautiful plants. We took off our socks and shoes because we didn’t want to get them wet. We got our water cups and asked for water from Maki. We pour some water in the little pots that we have around. We sang some songs so that the plants can feel better on this hot day. We went downstairs full of happiness on our faces; we started making a circle and sang some songs about the weather, good morning, and itsy bitsy spider. And then, John showed us a book entitled “Anansi the Spider”. The story originated from Ghana and it was all about Anansi the father of the six spiders. His sons have special abilities and their names were “See Trouble, Road Builder, River Drinker, Game Skinner, Stone Thrower and Cushion. When Anansi went a long way far from home, he got lost and fell into trouble. A big fish swallowed him. Back home, See Trouble saw from his vision that their father was in trouble. Road builder built some spider webs and they all went out to find their father. And when they arrived at the river, River Drinker drank all the water and left the big fish flapping on the ground. And Game Skinner helped Anansi to be out of the tummy but more trouble came for him. A falcon verged quickly and took him by its beak. But Stone Thrower threw a rock at his face and hit the falcon hard on the face. It let go of Anansi but he fell from the sky and the good thing was, Cushion was there to catch him. They are now a happy spider family. Anansi gave them a big light but they can’t decide who can have it. So the big light became a moon at night.

After that wonderful story, we did some puzzle activities again and our friends enjoyed doing them all the time. Our puzzle time was just short because we had to go to our garden again to do our water play. It was so nice to see our friends had fun with the water. We all got so excited but we had to remove our shoes again and put on our smocks for us not to get wet. We got some sponges too. And it was nice to use them while we all dipped them in the water and squeezed out the water. Sofia was so excited to use these different water play materials. Lisa also was having a lot of fun using the colored bottles and mirrors in the tub. Chloe stayed a long time using the small bowls and sponges as well. It seemed that she really had a great time playing with the water.

It was a nice learning experience for us again. Thank you so much Ohana and we hope to see you all on our parent-teacher conference. Have a good day!

Lots of love,

John, Sayaka and Maki