Buds Class – Journal - Winter Wonderland December 19th 2016

In Buds Class, we’re always ready to experience new adventures that our teachers prepared for us today. We did our morning jobs and finished them with a little help. We said goodbye to our parents and went straight to our activity table.

We did the Santa Beard art. There materials we used were the cotton, glue and Santa cut-out. Our teachers explained how to do this activity and we learned it quickly. We spread the glue all over the beard and slowly stuck the cotton on the beard. We touched and felt the cotton and our teachers asked us, “Is it hard or soft?” Then, we all replied, “soft!”

In the carpet area, Sayaka and Chiaki helped us with the Noah’s ark wooden toys. We loved sorting and counting them all the time. For example, we put the two tigers, two elephants and two zebras together. Matching and sorting are always fun to do in our classroom. Certainly, we are also developing more on our cognitive skills.

Miyashita-sensei went to ourclassroom for our gym class. So, we moved our stuff around and helped our teachers in packing away thetoys just to make more space in our play area. Our teachers encouraged us by saying, “thankyou for helping” and “well done in cleaning up. As we started our gym class, we did some warm-up exercises first by stretching and moving around. We also did some animal actions like bear crawl, alligator crawl, bunny jump and frog hop. Our number was just perfect and we all had a chance to do what our teacher was instructing us.

During our circle time, we sang songs about Christmas like Jingle Bells and Santa Claus is coming to town. We then talked about the penguins because John brought an activity where we put some cotton balls on the penguin. Then, we thought about the question, “Where do penguins live?” One friend of ours said, “Home! And home is on the street and if you have a car you can pay for the parking.” His answer was very detailed and our teachers were very glad to know that we could make this kind of connection. We learned that penguin live in the cold where there’s ice and snow. They can’t survive in hot places. We went to the balcony upstairs today and we surely had a great time playing with the small slides some mirrors andstones. We brought the round mirrors to our teachers and our teachers asked us, “What do you see in the mirror?” We answered, “Me!” We pointed at our reflection with a big smile.

Lots of love,

All the children from Buds class 2016-2017

Monday, 19th December 2016

It was the first day of our Winter Wonderland, Winter School at Ohana and we had a wonderful time with our friends and teachers. Flowers and Petals children were in one class and we met one new friend, Yulia, who will be joining Flowers Class from January. She played and laughed and sang and had so much fun, as if she has been at Ohana, for the same length of time, as most of us have. She was always smiling and was so excited to get involved in all of our art experiences, gymnastics and also working on the wall mural for the outside wall, downstairs.

We started off the day with puzzles, and some sensory games using pine cones, shells and sparkly shapes. At the second table, we saw socks, that had a piece cut off, and a variety of collage materials. What could these be? We already had our own socks on and we, for sure, didn’t need to wear broken socks. Ahhhhh, we saw on the table one cute snowman. Can we make one like him? Our teachers were all so happy that we were enthusiastic and we sat together with two of them and set to make him/her. We are not sure whether they are only called a snowman or maybe a snowlady! Shelley looked on the internet and she found some funny pictures of snowladies. We didn’t think about the gender of our snowman nevertheless it was an interesting subject to think about. All of the ones that we made we called a snowman. We socks were so soft and cuddly, we loved touching them. We took a large piece of newspaper and stuffed the socks until they were roundish and looked like the snowman’s tummy. In fact we had to fill the entire sock up all the way to the top. Then our teachers helped us tie a piece of yarn/wool around a section so that we could make one large ball for the tummy and one small ball for the head. We put the small part of the sock on top for a hat and then set about putting on a scarf, eyes, a nose and buttons for the tummy. Our snowman doesn’t have arms. We love cuddling it and look forward to taking it home later today.

Our Miyashita Monday was so much fun and went on much longer than usual.   We had gymnastics for en entire hour today. We did many new exercises today which were quite advanced. We made our bodies into tables and lifted one arm up and balanced and then the other arm and we did the same with our legs. Phew, this was so difficult. We pretended that we were bears and crocodiles and then we hopped on one foot and jumped with two feet together. We have learnt that sometimes one has to change ones plan. And today, Miyashita had to change his plan. He first put circular cushions in a line and wanted us to jump over the cushions but this was way too difficult. He changes his mind and asked us to jump from one cushion to the next and this worked. We did this a few times and then we had something extra at the end. One time we had to go under the string that was attached to two chairs, and another time we had to go over the string. We also had to stand parallel to the string and jump sideways over the it, five times. None of us could jump sideways. We could however jump forwards. At the end of our lesson, we went upstairs to the office and worked on the mural that we are making for the wall outside, because it was too late to go to the park. Do you remember we asked everyone to collect lids of bottles and bring them to school. Well, at last we are starting to work on this project. There are two large pieces of wood lying on the floor and we attached some coloured bottle tops in a shape on it. It was so much fun. We tried to use all of the colours but there were so many. Every day we will work on it and we have no idea what we will create as we are just pasting shapes and designs.

   It was a fabulous start to Winterwonderland and we are looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow. Enjoy the beautiful warm sunny day today.

 

Love from all the Flowers and Petals children in Winter Wonderland at Ohana.

Ohana International School