Little ones arrive at Ohana International School

Today was not a rainy day as everyone had expected. It was so hot and humid and we loved the cool air inside our classrooms both up and downstairs. Today we had children in both classrooms which was good and we had two teachers upstairs and two downstairs. Downstairs we had two mums for a little while as well, because Gento and Tokutaro are small and it was their first day at school. They will start next week and come three days a week to start. Kanako and Shelley had so much fun with them. They took so many things off the shelves and loved playing with the plastic food and plates. They sat together on the floor and at the table and collected eggs in pans and threw them out and then put them back in again; put dessert onto plates; bit the pizza; offered us all some fruit and food and they helped pack away so that we could have our snack. They enjoyed reading books and loved playing with the animal puppets Upstairs we spoke about our bodies as this is connected to our theme this month which is “Who am I?” We are going to learn all about our names and why our parents chose these beautiful names for us. While we are learning about our names we will consolidate all our previous learning about our bodies and learn many new things about them as well. During our morning circle, we spoke about bodies and included the concept of comparison in our learning. We all showed our hands and then we looked at them carefully, touched one another’s hands with ours and measured whose was bigger and whose was smaller.

One of our activities at the table, was making someone from our family using junk art material. Nico made his dad; Finn made his mum; Noah made his dad and Jamie made his mum. We used toilet rolls, markers, coloured fuzzy hair made from shredded paper and vinyl masking tape. We have some photos of them which we will put on the website. We also made hand prints on individual sheets of paper using paint and then we did foot prints on a large sheet of paper similar to the many group projects we did last year. We will put the hand prints into workbooks/portfolios and the large foot print painting will go on display. We think that the large painting will be a work in progress and we can add things to do it and print other parts of our body on it.

On the second floor all three of us did a group drawing using markers and wax crayons. We sang songs and started off singing “Everybody clapping”. We also did music to a CD by the Wiggles which included dancing and singing. Tokutaro, Gento and Ashling loved the music as they used instruments and shared them with one another. Tokutaro loved the microphone and he sang into it and held it in his hand the whole time. It was too difficult to share it with anyone.

Gento is really good at dancing and he stood up and bounced his body and shook his maracas in the air. Ashling loved playing the flute and spent the entire time blowing on it. Today was her last day as she and her parents are leaving tomorrow to go and live in Hong Kong. We loved having her at Ohana and will miss her soooooo much and wish her and her family a safe flight and good luck in their new home. Her mum is having a baby soon and while she was playing, she discovered a doll which of course became her baby. She even put it underneath her shirt and said that the baby was coming out of her tummy just like her brother will in November.

Tokutaro loved playing with the camera and took a lot of photos in the classroom. He kept his finger in front of the lens and nevertheless he did a great job.Wishing you all a good weekend and please stay safe if and when the typhoon rains come to Tokyo. We can’t wait to see you all next week.

Love Shelley, Darren, Kanako and Sabine