Where is spring?

It was a very spring like weekend and hope you all had a great time. We were sorry to hear that Shelley was feeling unwell today and missed her so much. We wish her a speedy recovery. This morning we had a lot of fun on the tables threading the farm animal puzzles and making things with play-dough. Another exciting activity was using the large plastic sieve from the kitchen and some colored pipe-cleaners which we decided would be good to stick through the holes in the sieve and then twist and bend them. Tokutaro then noticed how they moved and swayed like trees in the wind when he blew on them really hard which his friends all came to see. Allie and Vincent giggled with joy when they saw how easy it was to thread with the pipe-cleaners. After snack time we all sang the 'Hello Song' and together with Nanako read a book titled 'The Surprise Garden' and talked about all the different kinds of seeds. This led us to the large pieces of paper we painted last week with brown and green paint. Taking the colorful tissue paper seeds and some glue we stuck them onto the paper wherever we wanted. It was a little messy on our fingers but the pictures look beautiful.

On the 3rd floor we started the morning with the cork boards, hammers and nails activity on the table. Jenny made a beautiful picture of a house with Darren standing beside it. She looked so proud of her work and wanted to show all her friends. Nico and Beckett got the wooden train set out and used every single piece in the box  to make a long curving track that weaved underneath the tables too. It was funny to watch them overcome the problem of head on collisions with each other by both moving off the track with the trains in their hands, moving around each other and then placing their train and carriages back on the track. Nico and Marie today wanted to be snack leaders and so moved to the end of the table and asked everyone to put their hands up and counted 1,2,3. We did the snack song in both English and Japanese today which they children love. We all then looked at a beautiful book with pictures of seahorses on the cover titled 'Over in the Ocean, In a Coral Reef'. The book had lots of pictures of fish and other creatures that live in a coral reef including starfish on the ocean floor. Jamie then spotted our large starfish on the display shelf so we brought it down to have a good look at. Miya noticed how it doesn't have any eyes or ears and when we turned it over we saw all these lines running to the central mouth. F.J was very surprised to see the starfishes mouth in the middle.

We also took a good look at some coral and some sea shells. We then played a 'pirate treasure hunt' game where one of the children hid a gold paper coin somewhere in the classroom and the other children gave directions to the pirate to find the treasure. They all give directions to the treasure by calling out "Cold", "Getting Warmer" and "Hot" when they got closer to it. The park was bathed in sunshine and warmer than we expected today and it was great to see Nico and Allie playing together on the 'see-saw' equipment along with Sofia.

Have a great afternoon,

All our love, Darren, Shelley and the Ohana Team.