Welcome back Darren

It was so good to see our teacher Darren today and we were glad that he came back safely after being in England with his dad and family. He stayed awake the whole morning at school and we hope that he will be able to stay awake for his after school students! Good luck Darren and welcome home!

Today our teachers downstairs started to pack some boxes and we helped them. We took our collage containers from the red trolley basket and put them inside a box; we also helped clean up and pulled all the colourful origami cranes that were hanging by the window and dragged them towards the kitchen area. It is hard to keep them even though they are beautiful and colourful. They were made by children from a school in America just after the tsunami and earthquake of March 2011. They chose Ohana to receive them as their wish for Japan’s recovery after this terrible disaster. We were happy to have them hanging in our window for almost two years now. We too pray for the safety of all people around the world and especially those in Japan.

Downstairs, in between cleaning we played with toys and we worked at the tables. One of our favourite puzzles at the moment is the Thomas one. It is graded according to difficulty and has four separate puzzles in the one box. The first one is larger pieces and there are 12; the second one has pieces that are a little bit smaller however there are more of them and so on. We do not need our teachers to help us with the puzzles as we have learnt to look for matching colours and think about turning the pieces until the fit in the correct place.

While we were packing things into boxes we discovered that some containers were empty so we had fun with them. In one of the photos here you can see that we put the plastic bins on our heads that no longer housed the soft toys and puppets. We always think of interesting ways to play with toys and things in our classroom and today was no different.

At the activity table, we decorated hearts for Clodia and we did a new activity using circular shaped large and small stickers in red, white, blue, yellow and green. We started off on the mat and spoke about circles, looking for circle shapes on our carpet. We saw many different coloured ones with some inside others. We made a circle shape with our fingers and put them up to our eyes as if they were glasses, on our ears and on other parts of our bodies. At the table, Shelley demonstrated what she wanted us to do using circle shaped stickers and a marker. First we pasted the stickers wherever we wanted to on the page and then we took a marker and tried to join the dots with lines. Some of us understood the concept of drawing the lines and some of us needed a little more direction. Most of us ended up doing two pictures for this activity. Pulling the stickers off is good for our fine motor skills and helps us with our pinching grip.

Upstairs Jamie and Marie made birthday cards for Nico as he will be five on Thursday. We all busied ourselves either on the mat or at the table, on our arrival at school this morning. In the library we noticed that there were different books on the shelf and we discussed what we saw and what we thought the new books were about. Miya – pirates; FJ – sand castles; Jennifer – sharks; Jamie – octopi; Sofia – whales; Marie – turtles; Nico – dolphins; Sean – fish and Beckett – sand castles. We thought about where we would find these kinds of things and Miya and Jennifer said that you could find all of them in the water.

We then took out a book called “The Pirate Cruncher” and read it. In the story there is a map and you have to try to read the map to find treasure.

We made our own treasure map with an invisible path which we drew with cotton buds and lemon juice. Then Darren did an experiment using the paper that we had drawn on and some fire from the stove. When you put heat on the paper and lemon juice, the message suddenly appears. We were amazed.

Jamie tasted the lemon juice and we don’t think he liked it very much.

We sang “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, once I caught a fish alive”.

We hope that our friends who are feeling ill will be better soon and we want to wish William a happy second birthday for yesterday. We look forward to celebrating with him, when he is better.

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