We all hammer with one hammer....

Today we had seven children at Summer School and this kept our teachers really busy. Shoko, Maddie and Renshi came today and we had new interesting activities for our “Cool Construction” theme. When we arrived at school there were so many things on the table. There were wood, clamps, tools, nails, screws, sanding blocks and so many other things, we can’t even remember the names of them. When Shoko arrived she and her mum tried out how to use a screwdriver. Darren showed us all the tools and how to use them. The sanding block is for making the edges of the wood smooth a so that you don’t get a splinter. It is made from a block that is covered with sandpaper. He showed us how to use all of the tools and also to put them back in the correct place. Each one fits into a sort of a clamp on the tool board and there is a picture for each one to guide us. The first thing that we learnt how to do was to use a screwdriver. We had screws with a cross on top of them and we needed to use a Phillips screwdriver to put them into the wood. We also had some nails that you have to hammer into wood. Darren showed us how we use a hammer and he told us that we must be careful not to hold the nail, otherwise we would hammer the nail and our fingers. Ouch! We are making T-stools which our friends who are enrolled at Ohana for the coming school year, will use in circle time. They are stools that look just like the letter T and when you are sitting on them you have to balance yourself really well. Some of them are longer and some are shorter. The reason for this is that some of our friends are taller and some are shorter. We are looking forward to seeing what the T-stools look like and how we sit on them. Oh, we forgot to tell you that we used a drill as well. Of course Darren held it with us and guided the drill bit where it had to make a hole. It was fun feeling it vibrate when we were holding his hand. We made holes in the wood that we had sanded.

We had cutting with our squiggly pairs of scissors at the second activity table. We used scraps of paper and cut with the scissors and made interesting patterns on the paper. Most of us are enjoying using these funny pairs of scissors and we love getting a surprise when we cut with them as we are not sure how they are going to cut the paper. We had a shorter free play time on the carpet this morning as our woodwork was going to take a long time. After packing away and helping one another we stood in a circle and held hands. We sang ‘Everybody clapping’ and the other actions that we did were stamping, winking, blowing a kiss, tapping our knees and wriggling our noses. We sat down on the mat and sand our “Hello” song and our new friends are learning the words.

In one of our pictures, we are all blowing really hard. We are trying to blow the tower down. We built a tall tower and it is hard to build a really tall one without it falling down. The one we built today was quite tall and all the blocks balanced perfectly. So we all thought about how we could get the tower to topple over without knocking it with our hands or other parts of our bodies. We thought about using our breath. It was a tough job so nearly all of us came together and blew….just like the wind. And we blew it over! Crash it came tumbling down.

We had so much fun in the park and all of us were wearing our Ohana T-shirts which look great. Today there were five children wearing green ones and only two children wearing red ones. Shelley had a green one on and Darren had a red one on. We climbed on the climbing frame, mixed sand and water in the sand box and ran around with the different kinds of balls that are in our park bag. We love chasing our teachers and today it was Wendy’s turn to be chased. We read books in the library when we came back from the park.

Love Shelley and Darren