We are all International

Dear Flower Class parents, We hope you all had a great spring break and enjoyed the beautiful weather over the weekend. It was great to see the children all come to class this morning looking very happy and refreshed. Many of them told us all about their wonderful trips over the break and we discussed these in our circle time this morning.

We were also joined today by Darren’s son Aiden who is on his spring break this week from his school. Aiden is 10 years old and helped us a lot today. On the tables we saw the big pots of paint, some vehicle stencils and a big sheet of blue paper. We put on our art smocks and used the stiff brushes to paint through the stencils. We had several different kinds including: a tractor, a bicycle, an airplane, a car, a train and sailboat. Together we made a big picture with lots of vehicles. Tomorrow we are going to add some more details to the painting and will put it on the wall. On the second table we worked on some pink flowers to go in one of our friend’s special portfolio books as she is leaving Ohana very soon.  We also had the chance to use the play-dough we made just before the spring break today as well to make stars and cakes. On the carpet we saw the small train set and set up the pieces to make an oval track with train parking. Soon we got the big box of train tracks and carriages out from the cupboard and added these to the small set. We were able to make a very big track going most of the way across the classroom together. The big Duplo building blocks were also very popular this morning and we enjoyed building lots of things on the big red baseplate. We saw the weather was not so good today and had a little more extra time to play today. Once we had cleared away the toys and art materials we did our small circle time together and talked a little about how we can make our friends happy again. Darren gave us some examples such as whispering about our friends, making fun of them, having secrets we don’t want to share and refusing to hold our friends hands when we make a circle. We told Darren that it was not nice what he was doing and wanted to help our friends be happy. We looked at our friends faces to see if they were happy or not and the reasons why. After our yummy snacks we all sat together and told our teachers all about our spring break. We heard lots of details about what we did including: travelling to Kyoto by Shinkansen, staying in a Japanese hotel, attending a wedding, travelling a long way by car, flying to grandma and grandpa’s house, eating Easter chocolates, visiting Hong Kong and then going skiing together with our friends, visiting Guam and playing in the pool and on the beach and flying to Disneyland in Los Angeles. We all had a great time and although we couldn’t all remember what we did! In gym class today we warmed up with some jumping, squats, star jumps, arm rolling and shaking. We then practiced our bridge pose before doing our backwards roll practice and star jumps around the chair. We then played a ‘traffic light’ game where we approached Miyashita Sensei and when he said the colors we had to do different actions e.g. Blue-2 steps forward, Yellow-Look around, Pink-Rotate, Orange- Balance on 1 leg and Red- Run back to the mat. After gym class we all looked at a book together called ‘Children around the World’ and saw how there are many kinds of people in the world and how we are all different but also alike. Darren’s son Aiden told us that his mother is Japanese and his daddy Darren is from England. We all told us where we are from and we were surprised to hear all the different countries represented in the class. We looked at a big book called ‘Children Around the World’ and saw all the similarities between the children from India, England, Canada, America and China to us all here in Japan. We then reviewed our big ‘International’ chart on the wall. We also noticed that Ohana has other words in it ‘Ohana International School’. The International means from all over the world, just like all the children in the school. We then discussed how we like some of the same things as the children in the book and how it’s ‘okay’ to like different things.

Have a great afternoon and we look forward to seeing you all again tomorrow.

All our love, Darren, Pooja, Pauline and Ryoan