Well done Darren and Ayaka's children

Our teachers asked us to please remind our parents that the date for the end of year parties was set a long time ago, and we were sad to see some mums, dads and friends missing today. Our end of the year parties are milestones for us at pre-school, and this is our one opportunity in the year to show case some of the things we have learnt and love in our classes. All of our friends are expected to be there on that day even if they do not attend school as we celebrate the end of the year with songs, gifts and a party.

We had a great celebration with Darren, Ayaka and our parents this morning. We walked in to our classroom so proudly all ready to sing in our soft sweet voices. Shelley said that sometimes she hears us singing really loudly however today, we sang softer……we are not used to seeing our parents in front of us and were a little shy. We loved having props for some of our songs. We had sunshine, rain, hearts and clouds for “You are my sunshine” and for “Five little ducks went out one day” we had ducks and ducklings to hold up. We have loved our literacy and language classes at the end of our day and especially enjoy singing the tunes that are associated with each sound that we have learnt. We sang rhymes for s, a, t, i, p, n, c, k, e, d, f, m, h, and n.

Nico was presented with a banner honouring him as a founding member of Ohana since he is the real ‘sempai’ of the school. He started at Ohana right from the beginning and everyone at Ohana is so proud of his achievements over the past 3 years. Well done to all the “Class of 2013” who are leaving and staying. You did a great job and your friends, teachers and family are extremely proud of you.

After opening up gifts and giving our parents their gifts, we sat down for a huge feast of fruit salad, cupcakes, muffins, vegetable dip and more. We want to say a big thank you to our teachers for all they have done for us this year and also to our mums for their love, kindness, caring and generosity throughout the year. Today was a great celebration.

Downstairs, we were sad because Liezel is sick but we were so happy because her beautiful baby sister came to work at Ohana today. She has been to Ohana before and she loves coming to our school. We loved having her too and we hope that Liezel is feeling better and will be back with in time for the party on Thursday.

We started off our day with puzzles with varying degrees of difficulty; some of us who are really good at doing difficult puzzles, like to do the very easy ones. We also had some headbands that were left over from our parents and teachers party on Friday night. We used markers and drew on them and then some of us put them on our heads. We used punches that have different shapes in them and we used the strength in our hands to squeeze them and the beautiful shapes fell out. There were hearts, trees, suns, and flowers.

We sat together on the mat and read stories together. The main story today was called “Ears, Nose and Toes”. The story was a simple story and each time we heard a line, we pointed to the body part that was mentioned. We sang “Heads and Shoulders” which is one of the songs that we will be singing at our party.

When you look at these photos here from today, you will see why our teachers love observing us. They get a window into our world and things that we notice and are thinking about. We are the best mimics and they think that sometimes we look like our mums and dads.

Today in our circle time we sang “There was a farmer had a dog”. We also learnt something new today; instead of us saying “mmmm” in order to replace a word, we clap our hands. When we leave out “b” we clap once; when we leave out “b” and “i” we clap twice etc. We will try this again tomorrow. We also sang “Everybody tapping” and then we said good morning in many languages; we sang “Wake up, it’s a lovely day” which is one of our all time favourites and we have also mentioned before that this was a song Shelley learned when she was three years old; which was a long time ago.

We are almost ready for our party on Thursday and look forward to a fun time with our mums, dads and whoever wants to come along for the celebration.

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