Feeling, listening, touching

After the crazy rain late yesterday, we were so lucky to have a beautiful warm sunny day that went with us to school today. Playing in the park was so much fun with a huge contingent of students attending Ohana and all of us having some time together outside. We love both our big and little friends and all play so well together. We ran, kicked the ball, threw the ball in the air, sat on the swings, hung upside down on the parallel bars, sat on the bouncing see saw, came down the slide, collected feathers and listened to the sounds around us.

Downstairs we are focusing on our senses at the moment and while we were in the classroom we listened to the noises around us. We heard people’s voices and the wind. Then we closed our eyes and our ears could hear a lot better! We heard trucks, a person blowing a horn, a telephone and a door closing. When we were outside in the park, we could hear the wind, hear the leaves rustling in the trees and we could hear a helicopter. When we first walked to the park we could only hear the helicopter and when we were in the park, we could both hear and see it. As we were leaving the park, we felt the wind blowing on our cheeks; we could feel the warm sunshine touching our cheeks too and we enjoyed how our skin felt as we walked back to school. We are trying to become more aware of our senses and how they make us see, hear, smell, taste and feel things in our world.

Shelley thinks that we use our eyes too much and we don’t give our other senses the opportunity to work maximally. When we close our eyes, the world around us feels different. We are looking forward to trying to experience our world differently during this month and hopefully throughout our lives.

 At the activity tables we played with wooden furniture, wooden figurines of people and plastic figurines of people. We loved talking about the people and what they were doing in the house etc. We threaded beads onto laces and read stories with our teachers and friends.

Upstairs we did some giant animal puzzles and felt really proud that we were able to complete them by ourselves. There was an elephant, lion, toucan, zebra, hippopotamus, bear and crocodile. At the activity tables, we all started to work on our own individual pictures of a jungle scene. We started off with a large piece of white paper and painted a few tree trunks using brown paint. Tree trunks are the body of the tree and the branches are almost like the many arms of a tree. We learnt about vertical lines which go from top to bottom and these were the kinds of brown lines that we painted today. We then took two tissues each and scrunched them up into a ball shape and dipped them in water. We dipped the wet tissues into green paint and dabbed the paint onto our pages wherever we wanted to; creating bushes and leaves. We left the paint to dry for a while and enjoyed looking at the gentle effect that dabbing the green paint on the paper had made.

 We sorted animal stamps into two types; those that live in the jungle and those that do not live in the jungle e.g. gorillas, monkey, butterfly, parrot and lizard live in the jungle and horse, snail and ladybug do not live in the jungle. We then used the animal stamps on the jungle backgrounds that we had made earlier in the day. We worked in two groups. One group continued adding things to our group jungle collage and the other half put animal stamps on their jungle pictures. Then we worked the other way round until all of us had added animals to our individual jungle pictures. We sang and did actions to “The Monkey dance” that was so many of our favourites when we were in the class downstairs. It was a truly wonderful day at school.

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