The day before our Golden Week holiday

Today some of our friends from upstairs came downstairs at the end of the day to do an activity with us. We were so happy to be with them and while they were drawing and using stickers for something special that we are all making, we did puzzles and some of our friends slept. Clodia watched them eagerly while they were working and then she had a turn to work on the project too. We ended up drawing on one side and on the other side we put dot markers and made designs.

It was fun working together as a team. Earlier on in the morning, our teachers on the second floor were walking with us to the park, when suddenly we made a detour. Shelley said that there was a nature garden with a pond nearby and this is what we were looking for. Just before we had to cross the road, we came across a very kind, friendly policeman who said ‘konnichiwa’ to us. We said ‘konnichiwa’ back to him and he raised his arms to stop the cars as we crossed the street. It was such a beautiful place. There was a wooden walkway and when we looked over the side of it we saw a pond, filled with little fish. Shelley saw a turtle jump into the water just as we arrived and unfortunately, it didn’t come up for air while we were there. Olivia saw a bridge over a river so she showed us the way and we crossed the river too. We loved being there and will return maybe during summer school. Then we walked to Step Park and had a fun time playing there, with the entire park to ourselves.

Back inside our classroom, we were very busy cooking this morning. We made pancakes without eggs and some of us ate two even before we had eaten our snacks. In fact we ate our snacks a little later than usual as we were a little full and we also were busy playing with a little boy called Adam and his mum, Eva. Then Shelley had another meeting and we sang our good morning songs and read stories together. Only later did we eat our snacks which was fine as we were not so hungry. Because we are learning about echo songs, we have been singing our “Copy Cat” song as this is one way to help us understand what an echo song is. Our “Copy Cat” song has actions and words and sounds in it. When we sing an echo song there are many words. The echo songs we sang were “I hear thunder” and “I am special”. We also then sang a canton with ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’. We  started singing and then Shelley joined in. It sounded like all of the words were being mixed up but they were not really. It is quite difficult to sing like this as we have to listen to ourselves singing and not be distracted by another voice singing in a different way.

When we arrived at school, we saw that there were many white boards on the table. This was great as it meant that we could each have our own white board to draw on. Jenny drew a puffer fish while Sofia drew her friend with beautiful curly hair. Our story today upstairs was called “One duck stuck”. Then we looked at some other books to find different kinds of birds. We saw owls, penguins, and ducks. We discussed how people have skin, dogs have fur, fish have scales and birds have feathers. We know that our skin protects our organs and bones; scales on a fish help them protect them and feathers on birds help keep them insulated from cold and warm weather. We took some art clay and used it to mould it into birds. We had an abundance of collage materials to add to the clay e.g. feathers, pipe cleaners, coloured matchsticks and beads. From next week we will be wearing our Ohana T-shirts so our teachers want to tell our mums, to please check and see whether we all have T-shirts. They think that it would be a good idea to have two as they will be sending one home for washing, every now and then. Wishing you all a wonderful few days of vacation.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.