Welcome back Yossi

Ohana is getting bigger and bigger each day and today we welcomed Yossi back to school after his long summer in Israel. This week we will be welcoming three new children to our school; Nicholas will be joining Darren and Ayaka’s class and Olivia and Walker will be joining Shelley, Nanako, Goh and Sabine’s class. We look forward to seeing them all this week and showing them how to do things at school. We are all so skilled at everything; our teachers continue to be especially amazed at how independent we are in the classroom downstairs; how much we like to be left to do things by ourselves and how quickly we understand instructions and can carry out tasks. Our mums and dads did a great job with us so far!

   Today we were all so happy to be able to play in the sandbox with a large umbrella providing shade for us. We kept cool and could walk to fill our bottles up with water and then return to the shade to dig and mix the water and sand together. Shelley was in Shiroyama on the weekend and found the umbrella in one of the large supermarkets there. We will use the umbrella every day when we go outside and will be able to spend longer in the sandbox than we did before. Shelley and Nanako thought that it would be a good idea for us to have our snack in the park, which we did. We took off our shoes when we sat on the picnic mat; sang our song and ate our snack happily. When we returned to our classroom we played with the blocks that make a noise when you shake them. We built with them and then we went to the carpet and used them during our music time. We played music on the CD and shook our blocks. When the music stopped we stopped too. We laughed when we played this game. Then we stood up and walked around the room and shook the blocks. When the music stopped we had to stop walking and shaking. We did many different movements. We ran, jumped, rolled the blocks underneath our feet, rolled them in our hands and then we became trains. We put the blocks down and held each other around the tummy and pretended that we were the coaches of a train. We made our arms move in circle just like the wheels of a train; we held our blocks to our mouths and blew them just like the train whistle and slowly and then we pretended that we were going to catch a train. First we walked on our feet; then we walked on tiptoes; then we galloped and lastly we ran so that we would not miss the train. We listened to the story called “Brown Bear” and are able to remember the names of many of the colours. We spent time engrossed in social play with our friends and one of the things we did was talk mobile phones. Shelley was trying to remember what games she played similar to this, when she was little. She didn’t think that she played this one with a mobile phone…….maybe she pretended to be a mum in the kitchen, cooking dinner for the family.

Upstairs while we were in the library, we read “Toes, Ears and Nose” and tried to complete the sentences. We had a discussion afterwards about how we can travel from one place to another. We said that you can go by airplane, boat, walk, run and train. Then our teachers asked us if we went away for the summer vacation. Many of us did go away and the next question was: “Where does your mummy and daddy come from?” We heard many names of places e.g. England, America, Israel, Germany etc. We looked at a huge ma of the world with flags from all the different countries on it. We looked at the places that we all come from and saw that in between the land there is so much blue. The blue is the ocean in the world. After looking carefully at the flags, we decided to make flags of our own. We used a selection of materials including felt, ribbon, paper, markers, pastels, coloured pencils and glue. We will add more to our flags later in the week.

We sang the song “Row, row your boat” because it was one of the forms of transport that we spoke about earlier, in connection with us traveling during the summer vacation. We made two boats and sat behind one another on the mat and rowed the boats. We pretended to have a race just like they did during the Olympics.

Today was a great start to a new week. Thanks for all the fun and learning.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Christine, Nanako, Sabine, Ayaka and Goh.