Welcome Alexander

Today was a beautiful spring day and upstairs, we maximised our time outside and had a snack picnic in the park. We took our bottles, snacks and picnic mats and had a beautiful snack underneath the last of the remaining cherry blossoms. It was great to be able to enjoy playing outside once again, with some of us baring our legs and arms for the first time since the start of winter.

Yossi and Tirza were very excited to see the chess board on the table this morning when they arrived at school. They played together for a long time until their game was complete. This morning we added castles or rooks to the board so they played with them both. We learnt that the castles or rooks move vertically or horizontally, backwards and forwards and they are quite valuable pieces on the board.

 Once again, we are being extremely observant when it comes to all the different flowers that we see each day. On our way to the park, we noticed different flowers from the ones that we had seen yesterday. We also had an opportunity to take care of the flowers that we planted in the park. We saw marigolds, hyacinths and Japanese tsutsuji.

  After coming back to school after our outdoor play time and picnic snack, we read a book called “Little Quack”. It is the story of a little duckling that hatched in the spring and is a little scared to join her mother duck, swimming in the river. She eventually summons up the courage to join her and then discovers what fun it is to swim and catch fish.

In our circle time today, our class was divided into two groups. The reason for this, is that we are making a group art project of cherry blossom trees and flowers. We first looked at the brown origami paper and noticed that it was brown on the one side and white on the other side. We realised that if we were going to make the tree trunk and branches, we would probably use the brown side so which side would we put the glue on? We worked out that we needed to put the glue on the white side and when we attached the white side to the background, we could see the brown. If we had done it the other way round, we would have seen the white side and the brown  part would be attached to the background. We learnt how to tear the paper rather than cut it by placing one finger and our thumb close to one another; and pulling in the opposite direction. We used these to make trees. The second group made hanami  tearing and scrunching up white, pink or peach coloured tissue paper. We glued the branches and tree trunks down on the background and will add the flowers tomorrow.

 In the other class, we sat at the large table with a whole lot of pieces of newspaper. Our task was to tear the newspaper into strips and little pieces. On a huge piece of paper, we had some double sided tape and we attached the pieces of newspaper onto the sticky part. We will continue doing this activity tomorrow and add to it during the next week. We are trying to develop strength in our fingers and tearing paper is a great way to do this. We were not sure how to stick the pieces onto the paper because we did not have glue. Shelley pulled the back off the double sided tape and then we touched it and felt that it was sticky. Many activities that we do each day, help us build on this skill. Tearing is quite challenging for most of us as we are still learning how to use our hands and fingers bilaterally……with both sides. We will continue doing more and more of these activities and with the guidance and encouragement of our teachers, we will all become proficient at it. We completed pasting our photos and some of our art work inside our Workbooks/Portfoilios with Hisami. When we are working we use a lot of vocabulary that is onomatopaeic as this helps us understand the true meaning of words and we do actions to them. We love singing and sounds and rhythmns. When we spread glue on paper, we sing

‘spread, spread, spread the glue,

spread it everywhere,

spread it all along the page

and in the corners too”.

We sat together in our circle after holding hands and today we sang the fun song about people living in different parts of the world, and how they say hello. Today we also went to Australia and said “g’day mate”. Alexander joined us for his first day at Ohana and he had a fabulous day, doing activities, sitting and watching us while we were singing etc. He joined in with everything and at the end of the day, our teachers said that they couldn’t believe that he had just started at Ohana today. We look forward to playing with him tomorrow and on the other days that he will be attending Ohana.

We listened to and read the story “Brown Bear what do you see?” Using animals to teach us vocabulary and concepts is great as we are all interested in animals and love making their different sounds.

  We have started to dress up in some of the fancy dress costumes that we have in our Dolly Corner. We used to use hats and accessories a lot and have now graduated to wearing the clothes. We love looking in the mirror and also like having photos taken. Hisami sang the family song with her finger puppet glove and we love it because we can all relate to most of the characters e. g. mother, father, brother, sister and baby. See you tomorrow for the last day of this week.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Christine, Maryna, Sharee, Liezel, Ayakam, Hisami, Goh and Nanako