Welcome back!
Today we were so happy to see one of our classmates after almost two months away! He settled really well even though he is still tired and enjoyed being with his friends and teachers once again. He has even remembered quite a lot of English and he especially smiled when we sang our snack and lunch time songs. He remembered the words and the actions. He turned four while he was in Germany but we will still celebrate his birthday at school one day in the coming weeks. Shelley came to school just when we were getting ready for our snack time as she had to go and get her visa. It was good to see her back with us and she started off her day having her breakfast and snack with us while we just ate our snacks. Afterwards we went to the library and read a number of books on our own and then we sang our new song called “I am special”. We remembered that it was an echo song so we waited for Shelley to sing a line and then we copied her; all the way to the end of the song. The last line is “I love you” and we do actions with our hands; we point to ourselves for “I”; we hold our hands together touching the place where our hearts are for “love” and then we point to our friends and teachers for “you”. Shelley has told us before that we don’t only need words to understand people; signs are important too especially for people who are deaf and cannot hear the sounds that there are in the world.
We will learn some signs during the coming month.
In this photo, we are all sitting in the library after singing our echo song. In the song, we mention that we love our mommies and the book that Shelley chose to read to us today was called “Mommies are for counting stars”. In the story there are many things that mommies do that makes our time with them so special; they cook for us, they cuddle us when we hurt ourselves, they bath us, read us books, and the list goes on and on. We will talk about what makes our mommies special for us during the week. We all have many special people in our lives including our families and our friends. All of them have different roles to play in our lives and do different things for us that make them important to us.
During the morning we played on the mat and used the wooden, rubber and plastic pieces to build things. There is a guide in the container which we sometimes follow if one of our teachers is sitting with us; sometimes we also like to create by ourselves. We sang our morning songs and put a new day, date and weather on to the calendar. We are learning the days of the week this way and enjoy being given a turn to put a word, number or picture onto the chart. Through doing this each day, we are also learning the symbolic representation of numbers. We sat at the play dough table, rolled little balls and used the cutters to make shapes.
You can see that we are having fun in the sun outside today. We played with the elephant feet; and sat like a guard on top of the big slide and spent time filling bottles up with sand that he threw onto the slide. We discovered that if you throw sand onto the slide, you go really fast and we love sliding fast. One of us is doing some “gold panning”. He sifted sand and took all the small stones left behind and filled a container with them. Our older friends used play dough to make the shapes of letters, after lunch. They do special activities at the end of the day while some of us rest down stairs.
Our new website is looking really good and is not yet up and running. It is still in the making and will always be a “work in progress” as we will be adding things to it all the time. As soon as it is ready to be seen, we will let you know. We also wanted to remind everyone that school is only open for three days this week. We have two days off (Thursday 10th and Friday 11th) to spend with our mums and families and hopefully some dads will have time off on Friday. We wish our classmate and his family an easy time settling back into life in the “big city” and are so happy to have them back with us at Ohana.
Love Shelley and Darren