Friendships and fun

Our last day of our first week at Ohana this year was filled with more fun, learning and friends. We continued doing our marbling activity that we experimented with yesterday and made some more beautiful pictures. We will put some of them in our portfolios and use the others when we do something else for a special occasion. We loved smoothing the shaving cream, having turns to use the dropper and put colour on the white. We made swirling patterns with a paint brush and loved seeing the designs appear when the shaving cream had been scraped off.

Nina, Michaela and Luka drew pictures at the drawing table with Shelley. Luka made a spider and a snake; Michaela drew her mummy and Nina also drew her mummy. We played with some sand on the large tray and some of us really love sensory experiences with sand, play dough, water, shaving cream etc. Our teachers will continue to provide us with a variety of activities each day, balancing our cognitive learning with our need to touch, feel, smell and socialize with our friends.

We did another two 49 piece puzzles in groups today. We noticed that there is a piece missing in the one which is a pity. Our teachers will try to make a piece for us! At the second activity table on the carpet we had a “Unifix” cubes game. We placed the cubes in a plastic tray that had numbers in each column. We matched the numbers and cubes and filled the trays. We could also make towers with them and stand them in the tray. We are playing number games and developing

our number concept every day with different materials. We extended our experience with numbers today using the white magnetic boards, numbers and magnetic objects. We went through all the numerical symbols and chose a number for ourselves. We then chose magnets in different shapes and placed them next to the numbers.

We sang our new good morning song and some of us already managed to memorise the words:

Hello …… ohayo gozaimasu

How are you today tell us

I’m fine thanks, arigatou

We welcome you to Petals Class

We read a book called “Joseph had a little overcoat” for story time and looked carefully at the cover, trying to work out what the story was going to be about. We saw a man on the cover with a long overcoat and there was also a duck. The story was about a man called, Joseph who had a long overcoat that became old and torn. He refashioned it into a jacket which in turn became old and torn. He was really good at recycling his clothes and the last thing that he made was a button, which he lost. He looked everywhere but could not find it; so he made a book with the story about him and his overcoat in it. When he lost the button, he thought that he had nothing but when he wrote the book he realized that he had something from nothing.

We spent some time playing in the park and enjoyed being outside in the cool air. While we were there, and this is exactly what happened earlier in the week, when we were in the park, it started to rain. The drops fell slowly so we didn’t have to run, this time.

Our soft toys came back from the cleaners yesterday so now we have a large crocodile that we enjoyed playing with as well as some of our old smaller toys. We helped take them out of their wrapping when we arrived at school. It felt as if we were opening gifts as they had pretty ribbons on them.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel