Welcome Jennifer

It was so good to have all of our teachers back with us today. Shelley was so thankful to Darren, Sabine, Goh and Kana for looking after us all yesterday while she was trying to get better. Today we welcomed our new friend Jennifer to our classroom downstairs. She is already two and a half years old and is learning the routine of school and what we all do together. She watched us carefully to see what we were doing and learnt so many things really quickly. We think that she will have a great time with all of us at Ohana and want to welcome her and her family to our school. In the photos that you see here, we are doing activities, reading books, playing with play dough, dancing and singing and doing many different things that make up a day in the life of Ohana. We did actions to “Hot Potato” and “Do the monkey” which are two of our favourites. We also sat together on the mat and sang our “Hello” song. We are all so good at singing the words that when we get a new student in our class, they learn the words really quickly too; we are good role models, our teachers say! Whenever we do circle time with Darren, he plays a tricky action song with us. He tells us to do certain actions but when he is doing them, he touches the wrong part of his body. He says “touch your shoulders” and he touches his head! Then he says “touch your knees and he touches his shoulders. We have to try not to copy his actions but rather listen carefully to his words. He did one thing which was way too difficult for us. This was doing two different actions with our hands. He told us to touch one hand on our head and the other hand on our tummy………..co-ordinating two hands with two actions is a little challenging for our younger friends and some of us too!

We read a few books on the mat together. Shelley read us “Mommies are for counting stars” and Darren read us “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”. IN the story about the caterpillar, we did actions e.g. eating and rubbing our tummies; building a cocoon and rolling our arms; eating our way out of the cocoon and flying like a butterfly.                                                                                       We played a movement game where we lay on our backs and lifted our legs into the air. We moved them as if we were riding a bicycle; running and skiing. We enjoyed lying on our backs and doing actions with our legs in this way. Usually we stand on our legs and do actions but this time, it was different. We also said the poem, “Round and round the garden” and did the actions together with a partner.

We made salt dough at one of the activity tables in preparation for making ‘salt ceramics’. We helped pour all of the ingredients into a bowl and then we mixed them together. We sang the song “1,2,3,4,5,6,7………” while we were mixing. We poured in salt and then tasted it as some of us thought that it was sugar! We added flour and a little water. We then said the magic words “Abracadabra”. This helped the ingredients mix together! We said the magic words a few times. Then Kana kneaded the mixture a little more and she brought it around so that we could touch it again. It felt really cool and a little hard. We thought that it would be similar to play dough but it is a lot rougher. We will make something with it on Thursday when we are all together again downstairs.

Love from Shelley, Darren, Kana, and Marie