Dressed to the nines

It was good to see some friends and Christine back at school today and we welcomed Abiya and her mum and dad for their first day at Ohana. Abiya settled beautifully after a while and joined in with all of our activities. She particularly loves singing and dancing and even though she didn’t know the words to the songs, she was singing with a big voice and so much happiness and joy.

 We had many activities set out on the tables for us to do today and we were lucky in some way that it was raining so that we could have a long time to do them all. One of them was decorating a card for Eva and Oliver as they are leaving Japan to go and live in London at the end of this term. Abiya, Ava and Lily did some work on the card and then we sent it upstairs for our older friends to complete. The second activity was painting on our contemporary art projects. We used a dark purple and a light purple colour for our paintings together with brushes and rollers. We will add more to them tomorrow and then hopefully by the end of the week, the will be completed. The third and final table activity that we did was decorating stars. We sat at the small table which was covered with newspaper. Each of us had a small container with sparkles and jewels in it. Sometimes sharing can be a bit challenging for us so our teachers decided to give us our own things to use in order to avoid any difficulties. At other times we can learn from conflict and work out ways to sort things out by ourselves and share with our friends. We used brushes and glue and pasted the jewels and sparkles onto the stars. Some of us may have Xmas trees at home or other decorations for the festive season and we can hang our stars on the trees when we take them home.

Our story today was called “The Princess who lost her locket”. We learnt from the story that she didn’t take care of her things and was always losing them or leaving them in the wrong place. Her locket was her most precious thing and she had to go searching for it. Fortunately she found it and we hope that she will now learn to take care of her things. Our teachers said that maybe she had too many things and this was the problem!

Upstairs, Jennifer, Nico and Shoko decorated their stars using gold and silver paint as well as jewels and sparkles. Afterwards we all made holiday cards using a small piece of paper that looks like our “Jackson Pollock” art work. We cut a piece of paper and folded it to make card. Our teachers wrote a message inside the card and then we signed our names. We also added more cards to our M. C. Escher canvas and it looks very modern and strong in its design.

 We had fun dressing up and sitting at the breakfast table ‘eating’ with our friends and teachers. Ayaka read “How to catch a star” to us and then we wanted to read a book to our friends. Jennifer read “What will I wear” which suits her look today; FJ chose “Clifford celebrates the year”; and Shoko chose “Princes Friendship activities”. Then we worked as a great team and decorated a small tree which has many lights on it that change colour. We were so excited when our teachers plugged the cable in and the lights came on flashing. We added black to our canvas and instead of sitting, we walked around the canvas and let the black paint trickle on to it making lines.

It was a rainy day today so it was not possible for us to go outside and play however in both classes we put the music on and played with musical instruments. Downstairs we did movements and singing to The Wiggles CD and upstairs we used rainbow ribbon sticks, tambourines and bells. We moved around the room and waved our instruments fast and then slow. We each had a turn to use the different instruments and ribbons.

We look forward to welcoming our new friend Andres Felipe tomorrow morning upstairs and trust that Miya will be well enough to come back on Thursday.

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