Snowflakes falling down

We had a wonderful time singing together with the guitar and our famous guitar player, John, from Buds Class. He played the “Ohana School song”, “If you’re happy and you know it” and “Skinna marinka dinky dink”. John then thought that we should get up and move our bodies so we stood up and sang: “Shake your body……….and turn around…….and stop!

Knock your knees……….and turn around…….and stop!

Clap your hands……….and turn around…….and stop!

Run in place……….and turn around…….and stop!”

We also learnt the concepts up and down because we had to jump really high, reaching up to the sky and then we jumped down low.

Early in the morning when we arrived in class for the third day of Winter Wonders, our winter school programme, we saw Maryna, Maki, Ayaka and Hisami very busy chopping up vegetables and putting them into containers. We had a huge selection of vegetables viz. Chinese cabbage, avocadoes, tomatoes, beetroot, carrots, cucumber and red capsicum. After music time, we all went to sit at the tables and tore off some small bushes of parsley and we peeled the skin off the oranges. Some of us wanted to eat the oranges so Maryna had to give us clear instructions about peeling them and not eating them. We looked inside the one large container with chopped up vegetables and we noticed that the white bits of cabbage were pink. Maryna told us that they changed colour because they were mixed with the red tomatoes. This was something interesting for us and reminded us of the experiments that some of us did upstairs in Flowers Class with water and colouring.

Maryna added the orange to the vegetables and the parsley that we had torn into pieces. Our teachers added some hot water to the mixture while Maryna stirred it. Our teachers really loved eating it. It was a raw food soup that is so healthy. Most of us are really fussy about the colours in our food; some of us don’t like green things or white things or red things so only Jeremy, Jessica and Kenichi were prepared to try it. Our teachers think that if all of the vegetables are pureed and blend into one colour, the chances that we will taste the soup, are a little higher.

We had such a long snack time table because there were 15 children at the Winter Wonder winter school programme today. We all

spent the day together which was wonderful; some of us had much older role models and some of us had much younger role models. We all realized that you can learn from anyone in the world; both good and bad.

Earlier on in the morning we made snowflakes out of white paper, white pastels and blue paint. We drew with the white pastels onto a circular shaped piece of white paper. It was a little confusing because we couldn’t really see anything. John encouraged us to make circular patterns and some lines. We were surprised when we painted over the white, suddenly the patterns appeared and they really look like snowflakes. John cut out many different snowflakes and just before he read a story to us, he stood on a chair and counted one, two, three, four, five and he sprinkled all the snowflakes down onto us. We picked them up gently as snowflakes are really fragile, and gave them back to him. He did this another time for us………

The story that he read was called “Stella – Queen of the Snow”. We forgot to tell you that we had another art experience. This time we made a brown handprint and used our fingertips to make little white fingerprints. Our brown handprint represented a birch tree with our fingers being the branches and the white fingertip painting was for snow.

We had such fun in the park. We did running, swinging, races and sliding in the park. What a wonderful day we had……and we also need to tell everyone that Hisami had her real birthday today. She told us that she was eight but we don’t think that’s true. We think that there is another number in front of the eight!

Happy birthday Hisami! See you tomorrow for another lovely day.

Love always the children at Ohana International School