Losar Tashi Delek - Happy Tibetan New Year

Today is Tibetan New Year and we learnt about the five colours of the Tibetan prayer flags, the elements that they represent and we all received a colourful string necklace from Miyuki, Tokutaro’s mum. She sent a box of beautiful flowers too. It is important that we honour and learn about many different cultures as this helps us try to understand the world and also to embrace difference which is one of the most important things about Ohana International School. We celebrate difference; we embrace difference and we eventually see that there is no difference in the difference! It sounds complicated but it is not really. Downstairs many of us are still trying to differentiate the colours and we were lucky that Emily knew most of them and Gento helped us identify green. The colours of the Tibetan prayer flags are white for the element metal; blue for the element water; red for the element fire, yellow for the element earth and green for the element wood. We counted five colours. Our teachers tied the colourful necklaces around our wrists and we looked at the calendar from last year with the picture of a rabbit on it. We know that this year it is a water dragon. The rabbit last year symbolised strength and determination together with intensity. The water in the water dragon calms the dragon’s fire. The water dragon sees things from many different points of view which is a good sign. We traced our hands on beautiful handmade paper and pasted our faces on our hand; which was then pasted onto our large painting. It is our “Art of Giving” painting and we will try to see what we can think of that we would like to give to those that we love…..in words. We also played with play dough, put colourful counters into containers and traced our hands for our large painting. Our teachers cut our hands out and we pasted our photos in black and white onto our hands. They are now a part of our large painting which is hanging alongside the window in our classroom. It is still not yet finished.

Upstairs, we selected beads so that we could make a necklace for our mums or dads. We used tweezers to pick the beads up and then we chose a special colour for the necklaces. We counted the beads as we strung them onto the thread and when we were about half way we stopped and added a large foam shape which is the pendant. During our circle time we read “Sharing is Caring” and sang “Love is something”. We also hugged our love heart cushion.

Some of us know the beginning sounds of certain letters and today we all sang “A, a, ants on my arm”. This is the song that we sing when we learn the sounds from the Jolly Phonics program. We looked at the page in the book and tried to find things that start with the “a” sound. We found apple, ant, arm etc. After this, we each took a white board and wrote the letters “a” and “s”. We also wrote our names using our cards and the white boards. On the same white board, we drew a picture of someone that we love. It was so funny because we all drew our mums!

During lunch time we learnt about the Tibetan New Year. We learnt that in different countries they celebrate different things. Sometimes they celebrate the same things but at different times of the year.

Love Shelley, Darren, Kana, Marie and Goh