Where are the little girls you sent me, where are the little boys that cried......

Today upstairs Sean and Beckett started their day playing with the wooden blocks and cars. Sean built a road with the longer wooden blocks and then the cars were able to drive on them. FJ wanted to make a costume using newspaper and tape so she cut out lots of pieces of newspaper which she pasted together. She made the newspaper into a bat costume. During the early part of the day we all drew on an enormous piece of cardboard which we made into gift wrapping for a present that we made. We decorated it with coloured markers and tape and all of us were keen to participate and draw something of our own.

Since tomorrow will be the last day of our school year with some of our teachers and friends, we are coming to the end of our theme on “Wild Animals”. We found pictures and information on penguins and flamingos. We also did some research on the dimensions of ostriches and the albatross. We used 30cm lengths of tape and measured out 270cm, taping the 30cm strips together. We taped them to the wall and in the end we realized that an ostrich is taller than the ceiling of our classroom. The albatross was 330cm which was even taller than the ostrich. If we lay down on the floor and put the entire lengths on the floor, we could see how small we were in comparison to both the ostrich and the albatross.

While we were in the park, Sean and Ava pushed each other on the swings while Nico, FJ and Beckett played on the slide with the ball. They rolled it down before they slid down themselves and then tried to catch it at the bottom.

 Downstairs we did a little practice for our party tomorrow and learnt how to walk into the room and stand on the green line. Usually we sing enthusiastically but for some reason today, we were not so keen on singing with big voices and co-operating much. We think that our teachers were not so happy! Maybe it was the weather or maybe we just wanted to be left to our own devices for most of the day. Tomorrow is another day and we are sure that we will find our beautiful singing voices to sing to our parents and friends.

 When it was library time, we sat on the chairs that our mums and dads will sit on so we could pretend that we were the audience and the actors!

Our favourite thing over the past few days has been dressing up and playing imaginatively in the house corner. We mentioned before, our teachers like observing us during these times especially and they learn how much we know about the world of “big people”. Today we had one visitor as you can see in the photos. Her name is Maya and Shelley used to be her teacher when she was 3 years old. She used to call her “Maya the bee” because there was a TV programme in South Africa when Shelley was growing up that had the same name. It was all about bees. Maya is on holiday here in Tokyo with her mum and so she came to say ‘hello’. She is already 10 years old and look how tall she is. She is taller than Shelley! Maybe one day when we are bigger, we will return to Ohana to visit our teachers so that they can see how much we have grown up. Shelley has students who are now mums and dads with children, living all over the world.

We know how to say hello in many different languages however as we come to the end of another year, our teachers realized that they never taught us how to say goodbye in different languages. Well, this is something that we can learn during summer school – sayonara, chuus, pa’alam, tot siens, au revoir, ciao, hardebra…

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