Happy Birthday Nico

Today we celebrated the birthday of one of the first children who attended Ohana International School when it opened in August 2010. Yes, our student who has been here at Ohana for the longest time is Nico. Happy birthday “senpai” Nico! We know that you had a great celebration with your family, teachers and classmates and look forward to telling everyone about it, later in the journal.

Downstairs, Thursdays are our fullest days and we were sorry that both William and Santiago are still sick and couldn’t be with us. Welcome back Olivia.

Our activities downstairs were hands on and involved lots of fine motor skills development. We had small ‘pom pom’ balls which we sorted into containers; Bead threading shapes onto laces; Olivia completed her heart for Clodia’s birthday and we had painting for our friends who did not attend school yesterday. Unfortunately we did not complete the painting activity however will do it again next week and maybe some of us can make the background for our friends. We played with musical instruments and danced and sang to our Wiggles CD. We are enjoying learning new songs and doing movements to different music however when we heart “Hot Potato” and “The Monkey Dance” we always smile and sing on the top of our voices.

When we are working we concentrate really well and we learn from one another.

Upstairs, we helped Darren pack some books from the library into boxes.  Marie, Sofia and Sophie made their “skull and crossbones” pirate flags while Sean and Yossi enjoyed shredding the white paper. Shelley spent some time with us and we had a lovely morning circle, discussion and singing together. We started off doing actions like jumping, nodding, shrugging our shoulders etc and then held hands in a circle shape. We all sat down in a circle too and sang “hello” in different languages to our friends. We bounced our knees and said “Shalom”; we clicked our fingers and said “Ohio gozaimasu”; we blinked our eyes and said “Guten Tag”; we wriggled our noses and said “Mabuhay”; we swayed and said “Bonjour”; we popped our lips and said “Neehow”. We counted seven fingers and then sang “There are seven days in a week” and Nico knew that today was Thursday and we knew that it was a birthday Thursday rather than an ordinary Thursday. Then we spoke about the ocean and all of us had a turn to think about something that you find in the ocean. We thought of fish, sharks, dolphins, starfish; shells, sea horses etc. When it came to ‘seahorses’ we had a chat about babies and we of course know we grew inside our mums however the seahorse dad carries the babies. Sophie mentioned that whales come from the ocean so we listened to a story about “Wally the Whale”. Now “Wally the Whale” is a story about a whale but it is a never ending story. It is not in a book, it is in Shelley’s head so of course she didn’t need her glasses (Miya offered to get her glasses for her). She told us about Wally the Whale and how he came to be swimming near Japan when he noticed a ship with really sharp spears on it called harpoons. Wally realized that he was in danger so he dived deep down into the ocean. However he needed to come up for air and he didn’t know if he was still in danger or not. So he set about searching for a disguise underneath the ocean and he found a huge piece of seaweed which he draped over his head and the people on the ship thought that it was a huge floating plant. Phew! He was lucky to have avoided danger in this way. We look forward to hearing more about his adventures one day.

Darren read us a story called “I wish I had a pirate suit”. We have some pirate dress up things in our dress up corner so we are able to pretend that we are pirates every day when we come to school.

Nico’s party was great and we had homemade cheese cake and ice cream for dessert after lunch. It was really delicious and we want to thank Nico and his family for the special treats we had today. Nico had a blue crown on his head and we sang “If you’re happy and you know it”; “Happy birthday to you” and “How old are you now”. Nico told us that he was five! We all gave him a big hug.

Outside we had so much fun as we spent most of the time making a long train on the roller slide with many of our friends from our school. We even had some other children join us as they could see how much fun we were having.

Happy Birthday Nico! We hope you have a great afternoon on your birthday.

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