Our first day at our new Ohana school

Today was not only the first day of April, but it was also the first day in our new school; and it was a beautiful day. We were so excited to see our new classrooms and all the things that were inside them and our mums and dads were also curious to see what our new school was and looked like. We really loved our old school and when we were sitting in a circle discussing our new school and the things that we liked about it, Shelley reminded us about the journey of life. She asked us how we started off when we were little and we remembered that we were babies; and we grew and became the little people we are today. The same is with Ohana; the school was born in the symbolic sense, like a baby and now it is growing up. Shelley said that we will get bigger just like our school got bigger.

Today we spent time exploring the new spaces and things as some things are new. We have lovely circular shaped cushions in front of our Lego and Chalkboard walls and we tried to stack them and climb on top of them. The motivation from our teachers for having these cushions was in case we wanted to reach the top of the walls and couldn’t we could stand on them. We also learnt that we can climb through the spaces in our room dividers……..this was so much fun. We have circular carpets in our library in Shelley, Liezel, Goh san and Nanako’s class and we enjoyed using them as stepping stones; jumping from one to the other.

Oh, this has been so much fun for us and we have hardly touched on a third of what there is in our classroom. We can’t wait to come back for more tomorrow and the next day and the next.

We had a fun circle time where we each had the opportunity to sing a song that we wanted to. We all sang and some of us asked our friends and teachers to help us. We sang a new song where we had to memorise the actions that we did and then say them in order as we came to the end of a verse. This was a bit tricky! We also had time in Step Park, our new outdoor play ground where we once again had the opportunity to play with new things and use equipment that we are not used to.

In Darren and Ayaka’s class we were so excited to be in our new school and we love it so much. Climbing through the holes in our room divider was really popular as well as looking inside the new boxes on the shelves. We welcomed our new friend Noa who has the same name and spelling as our old friend Noa. It was her first day at school and she really enjoyed herself. We want to say a big welcome to her and her mum as new members of the Ohana family.

The Velcro wall was also something interesting for us and we experimented with things to see what adhered to the Velcro and what didn’t.

We have so many beautiful photos from today and our teachers will put some extra ones on the website during the week. We are looking forward to showing our new classrooms to our friends who have not seen the school yet.

We read a book in The Berenstain Bears series called “Moving Day”. We can’t believe that it is only a week ago since all the boxes with all of our things inside them, were brought here from our old school. We thought about what we did when we were helping pack up things; we boxed up toys; we boxed up books etc. Our teachers then asked us to point out what our favourite toys or areas were in our new classroom; FJ loved the kitchen; Nico loved the decorative red egg timers; Beckett liked the blue line decoration on the floor; Jenny loved the spaces that she could climb through in the room divider; Miya loved the dress up corner; Marie loved the Lego wall; Aiden loved climbing through the spaces too and Noa loved the soft toy crocodile. It was a wonderful day and we want to say a big thank you to everyone for their wishes for our new school. We love it so much and really appreciate all the time and effort that all of our teachers put in to make it look so beautiful in such a short space of time.

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