I am special

We had a beautiful last day with our friends today and were so happy to welcome James back to Ohana. We had a different day with lots of time to play and interact with our friends and teachers. We also prepared our room for the party and moved tables out of the room and just had chairs for the mums and dads to sit on. We changed the way that we wore going to sit and our teachers decided that it would be better if we sat on the floor rather than on chairs. We are used to sitting on the floor and sitting on chairs was not so comfortable. Darren cut out shapes for us and he asked us which shape we wanted to sit on. Finn chose a pink star; Renshi chose a pink diamond; Noah chose a green circle; Nico chose a blue triangle; James chose a yellow star and we had two extra shapes for Sui and Jamie. Jou kun was coming too but we were sure that he would prefer to sit with his mum during the party. With the shapes, we knew exactly where to sit and where to stand during the entire party. The party was really special. We had so much fun singing and dancing and doing so many of the things that we loved to do each day during our year at Ohana. Of course the songs we sang were some of our favourites and it was great to be able to show our parents what we had learnt during the year; not only the words of the songs but how to work co-operatively in a group and be a true team member; and of course listen to our teachers.

We started off the party with the echo song “I am special” and we ended the party off with the song “Willaby wallaby”. Our parents took many photos of us and we can’t wait to go home and look at the present that our teachers gave to us. We think that it may be something to eat and something to look at. Towards the end of the party, one of our friends asked: “When are we going to eat pizza?”; we were so looking forward to the eating part of the party. Our teachers were amazed at how much we ate and we loved everything about the party today. We missed our friend Sui but she had a very high fever and she was at the doctor while we were having our party. We hope that she gets better soon so that she can come to Summer School on Monday. We were all boys today which is how most of the year has been at Ohana. Shelley is so happy that there will be two little girls coming for the new school year in August. Shoko already started and Miya, her friend will be coming too.

During the morning, we went for a walk around Amishiro Koen to see what the workmen are doing with the surface. We peered over the orange netting which had a sign on it that said “Keep Out” in both English and Japanese. We think that maybe some people don’t know how to read English or Japanese because they were sitting on the benches inside the park. We noticed that there were stones on the ground, that were being squashed by a small bulldozer. When the bulldozer squashed the stones the surface became white. We think that the surface looks really hard and not so safe for small children. We hope that they are still going to do something else to make the ground safer for us to play on and not so dusty and hard.

We want to say a big thank you to our teachers for an amazing year of fun, laughter, embracing difference, sharing, eating, painting, talking, jumping, writing, learning, sharing, caring and oh, the list is endless. We will miss our teachers and classmates from this year and hope that we can all meet again soon.

We would like to wish everyone a wonderful summer vacation and safe travels wherever you go. We are looking forward to seeing our friends here at Ohana again in August 2011 and for Summer School next week.

Love Shelley and Darren