Our garden in the park

Today was the perfect day for planting flowers and making our Ohana International School garden in the park. This was what took up most of our day however in between we had time for activities and of course our snack and lunch times. Downstairs we started off our day playing with books on the mat. We love reading and Miya requested “The Three Little Pigs” as she has the same book in German. We read the book together with our friends and even though the wolf looked scary, we were not afraid of it. We remembered the song that the pigs sang “Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf, lalalalala”. We also learnt from the story that it is not good to be lazy like the first two pigs who built flimsy houses that were easy for the wolf to blow down. The message in this story is similar to the one from the “Tortoise and the Hare”; the message is “slow and steady win the race”. The third pig spent a long time building his house of bricks and in the end it paid off as the other two pigs could run to the safety of his home.

Then we did some drawing at the activity tables and which we placed in our our art folders. We keep some of our work to put inside our portfolios and other work gets stored in our folders which our teachers will clean out at the end of the term. Sophie came back to school which we were really happy about and she completed her drawing for Finn’s book.

Upstairs, we also completed our drawings for Finn’s farewell book and those of us who had not yet done our “Scratch Art” trees, made them today. We went outside early so that we could meet the people from the Minato-ku ward office. They delivered shovels to us earlier in the week and today they brought the plants and fertilizer to the park. So after snack time, we dressed warmly in our coats and T-shirts and went to the park. Darren started digging with a really big shovel as we had to turn the soil and make it soft. Shelley helped him with another large shovel on the other side, where our second garden is. Later on Kana helped as well as turning the soil was one of the hardest jobs for us to do. We all used our small shovels and helped prepare the soil for planting. Then we took the flowers and turned them upside down so that they came out of their plastic baskets. We put them into the soil and covered their bases so that they were secure and their roots can hold them firmly in the ground.

We had so many flowers to plant and there were three types. One of them looked like little pink and white cabbages. We planted the pretty coloured flowers in the front; then the “cabbage” flowers behind them and at the very back, we planted the daisies. We were told that the daisies grow quite long so we decided to put them at the back. We love our new garden and will take care of it through the winter months. In spring time, when our flowers have grown fully, we will get new plants for the warmer season. This will be an ongoing project for us all.

Love Shelley, Darren, Marie, Goh and Kanako