I can ......................

Today is the first day of June 2011. We had a fun time doing our “Today is…..” chart because we had to change the month, date, day, weather and the season. We had so many things to do this morning and each of us had a turn to do something on the chart. When we had completed it, we stood up in a circle and had to look carefully at one another to see what similarities there were with our friends and teachers. We looked and thought and then Ren said: “Sui is wearing green; and Nico is wearing green and Shelley is wearing green.” We looked a little more and saw that Darren and Ren were wearing the exact same T-shirt. Not only were their T-shirts the same colour but they were the same design; they were Ohana T-shirts! Lastly Finn realized that he and Laura had something in common and it was also related to colour. He had black stripes on his top and Laura’s top was completely black. After this game, we stayed with our partner or partners and curled up like tiny seeds. We sang “I am a little flower” and did all of the actions and then we danced together with our friends. We always smile when we dance together and sing ‘lalalalalalala’. We also played games that focused on our theme for the month which is “I can….” We did activities and actions that helped us see what we can do and then we told our teachers “I can………….” At the end of our morning circle time we stood together and put our hands on top of one another’s; we then raised them slowly and lifted our arms in the air and shouted “yay”. We never realized how many things we can do and here are some of the things that will go up on the display board “ I can scratch my knees, clap, wink, wiggle my nose, sleep, think, click my fingers, tap the floor, jump, sit, ride a bicycle, swim, massage my friends and stand up. Shelley asked us each to say what we can do and our friends copied us to see whether they could do the same action. When we went to the park we continued with this theme and all went to hold onto the silver bars which was our starting point. Shelley drew a line in the sand with her foot and placed the stepping stones on either end of the line; this was the finish line. She demonstrated what she could do and we did the same thing and saw that we can also hop, run, walk sideways, jump forwards and walk backwards. We then played freely in the park and Ren created a freeze game for his friends and teachers. If he shouted “freeze” we had to stop still like a statue and then when he wanted us to move, he shouted “unfreeze”.

Back in the classroom we had story time and we did yoga. Our postures today were flower, butterfly and squirrel. Finn especially loved the squirrel posture and you can see that he looks like a cute squirrel in the picture. Our story today was one that could be classified as “absurd”. It is a story that even Shelley knew when she was little so it is a really old one. The name of the book was “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly”. We all thought that eating a fly was not such a good thing to do and then when we saw all of the other animals that she ate, we couldn’t believe our eyes! We were all riveted to the story and sat patiently watching each page to see what was going to happen next.

Just before lunch we did three more activities. The first one was doing actions to instructions from our remote controls. We had to lie down, swim, eat ice cream and sometimes the remote controls broke down so we didn’t know what to do! We learnt about directionality; staying inside lines and drawing from left to right which is the way we read and write in English. At the beginning and end of each line was a picture and we had to draw a line from the one picture to the other e.g. car – gas pump; bee – flower etc. The very last activity was matching letters of the alphabet. There were large shapes spread out all over the table and we had to match them to the alphabet chart on the wall. We did a great job and many of us already know the shapes and sounds of the letters both in lower and upper case.

Thanks for a fun day at Ohana.

Love Shelley and Darren