Feelings and family

When we arrived at school we noticed that our classroom was really quiet; and yet many of our friends were inside playing and working. We wondered why it was so quiet. Well, when we went inside our teachers were there but one of them had such a teeny tiny voice and it made us all speak quieter, for the entire day. It is interesting to observe how people behave based on what others are doing, in their close proximity. As the day progressed, Shelley’s voice became smaller and smaller and in fact, when she was trying to sing a song to us, she just stopped and said: ‘I am sorry but I cannot sing today”. We had a fun day with all of our friends and teachers and spent a large part of the morning doing puzzles. Our teachers sometimes don’t have the opportunity to observe us doing puzzles and it was great for us to have a large selection to choose from. We had three builder ones that have 49 pieces each; three Disney ones that have 48 pieces each and four Thomas the Tank Engine ones that vary from 12 to 48 pieces. Our teachers encourage us to make the frame first however some of us have our own way of doing things and we

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prefer it when adults let us find our way and achieve success in this way.

We changed our feelings in the feeling box and some of us had the same feelings as the ones that we had yesterday. Our favourite feeling is the ‘in love’ one and our teachers think that the reason for this is because it has lovely pink hearts on it. We can’t deny that we love pink hearts so this could be one of the reasons. Hisami chose ‘happy’ and Shelley chose ‘tired’ and ‘happy’ because she feels happy even though it is tiring to talk with such a tiny voice.

We sat together on the carpet and Shelley started to draw some pictures on the white board. We were really quick to guess what they were. Hana guessed that the first one was a dad which gave us a clue for the next few which were a mum, a brother and a baby.

We knew that they are all members of a family, so we sang “I want you to meet my family”. Actually, the family included many other

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members and Hana came to the conclusion that they lived on a farm because the other members were all animals. Shelley drew a dog, a cat, a sheep, a bird and a rabbit. Some of us knew the names in Japanese as this song has both Japanese and English words in it. Then we looked at our family photos which we loved. We counted how many members were in our families. Some of us have three people in their family; some have four people in their family; some have five in their family and even six and one of our friends has seven people in their family.

We will plot our family members onto our feelings graph after we have completed talking and focusing on feelings. We will also combine feelings and family because the feeling that we have being a part of a family is so special and beautiful. Dominik was the resident photographer in class today and he went around taking photos of some of us. He pretended that he was using an iphone and showed us the photo after he had taken it.  We also had a string tied to two pieces of furniture in our class so we had to think carefully when we wanted to go to the other side of the string. What could we do? We could climb over or we could go under and we did this many times during the day.

We were lucky to have some time to go to the park and play even though it was quite cold. Tomorrow is no school but some of us will come to play while our parents have their Parent Teacher conference. We hope that everyone has a great weekend and see you on Monday.

Love always the children in Petals Class.

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