Welcome back Christine, Ava and Lily C

Well, it was so good to see Ava, Lillian and Christine today after being away for so long in California. Ava was especially glad to be back with her old friends and our teachers were really happy to see Christine. If they could have shouted and screamed they would have, but they stayed calm while feeling extremely happy inside. We were also happy inside as we were once again doing fun things with our friends and teachers and of course, Friday means…………………..”I’m ready for KIDFIT”. Today was actually Lillian’s first

In our class today we are still consolidating our learning about muscles and understanding that all people have muscles and all animals have muscles. Sharks, lions, elephants, birds and even ants have muscles. We have muscles in most parts of our body but we don’t have muscles in our hair. Some of us said: “That’s silly” because we know that you can’t have muscles in your hair.

We loved using the horses and letting them drink water from the pond; we tried to hit the ball with the bat in different ways e.g. over arm, underarm, sideways, balancing it on the bat etc. We also had fun with the train and tug of war. Tokutaro showed us how powerful he is when he pulled the rope. He was the anchor at the back.

We had a fun circle time learning about numbers, number concept and counting. We sat together with our friends and sang hello in many different languages while doing certain actions; which we do every morning. Then we sang our “hello” song and Ava remembered all of the words and sang in a beautiful sweet voice.

We then noticed a container filled with petals. We tried to remember what petals are and then Shelley showed us a picture of a flower. That helped remind us that petals are the beautiful parts of flowers that are bright colours and attract bees and other insects to them. We also had a number of cards with stars on one side and numbers on the other side. We each chose a card and counted the stars on our card. In our own individual bowls we counted out the same number of petals as there were stars on our cards. We also turned the card over to see if we could recognize the numerical symbol. We all told our friends and teachers how many stars we had on our cards and we checked to see that the number of petals was correct. We then sang “The Numba Rhumba” song.

Upstairs you can see that we are getting too big to crawl underneath our chairs which is what we did today when there was no room underneath the table for our earthquake drill. FJ, Sophie and Jamie were keen on helping pack and make up the boxes so this is how their day began. We are all involved in the moving of our school to its new location and feel really respected by our teachers for this. We are seeing how our room has changed and helping remove things from shelves and when we leave the building that Ohana was born in, we will understand how things come to an end in one place and have a new beginning somewhere else.

We also made bracelets at the table this morning using our beautiful beads. Our motivation for this activity was to make something for our mums whom we love very much. Emily had a little accident with her finger when she was using a pair of scissors so her mum took her to the doctor who put a bandage on her finger and a “finger sock”. She was so brave and didn’t even cry.

Our story was called “Little one inch” which Ayaka read from a book called “Japanese Children’s favourite stories”. We also read “The old man who made the trees blossom”. We are all waiting patiently for the cherry blossom trees to blossom here in Japan but we don’t want them to blossom too early. We are hoping that since we moved the Spring Picnic one week early, the cherry blossoms will wait for us.

We wish you a great weekend, this one being the last one for Ohana in this building and hope that the temperatures warm up; our jetlagged friends get some sleep and everyone stays fit and healthy!

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