What can I do when I am angry?
It was so good to have Jamie back at school and we are looking forward to seeing him many more times over Summer School. When his mom first left, he was upset and within a minute, he was playing with his friends and teachers and he was happy for the rest of the day. Our teachers always tell mums that we may cry in the beginning but we usually settle really quickly. Our teachers pick us up and hold us when we are upset (if we are not too heavy) and then we feel comforted and taken care of and off we go to play with our friends.
Today was a special morning as we practiced again for our party next Thursday and Shelley taught us some sign language. She showed us what we need to do when she does certain movements with her hands. When she lifts her palms up, it means “stand up” and when she puts them down towards the ground, we “sit down”. It was a bit tricky in the beginning. She also reminded us that our mums and dads don’t really want to hear her, Darren, Wendy or Laura sing; they are coming to listen to our special voices. Shelley and Darren told us that there is a special treat for us at the end of the party and we will have a pizza lunch with our friends and families. The school day will end at 2pm so we will have our last day of the year at Ohana International School, till our regular “home time”.
We did cooking this morning in among all the other fun things. Today we made pancakes. First we felt the packet of 
pancake mixture; some of us said that it felt hard and some of us said that it felt soft. Shelley did an experiment with hard and soft. She asked us to feel the table and straight away we thought that it was hard. Afterwards, we still thought that the packet of pancake mixture was hard. So she left it at that as we had to make our pancakes and we were all really excited about it. We added one egg to the pancake mix and 150ml of soy milk. We all had a turn to mix everything with a spoon until all the white powder, egg and milk were mixed together. Then we added a little bit of oil to the pan and poured the mixture in to it. We had to keep our eyes open and look for bubbles; when the bubbles appeared we knew that the pancake was ready to be flipped. We also needed to see that they were a golden brown colour and then they were ready to be eaten. We had a selection of things to put on them or we could eat them plain. We had honey, strawberry jam and lemon juice. The lemon juice was Darren’s idea and we think it must be something that people do in England. Some of us even tried it and our comment was: “Aji ga nai!” We had two pancakes each and when it was lunch time; our teachers were amazed that we could still eat almost all of our lunch.
We went to the park at the beginning of the day because we thought that the weatherman said that it was going to rain later. It was nice and empty and in fact we were the only children there. We played ball and kicked the tennis ball, the plastic colourful ball and the large blue ball all over the park. We collected some water in our plastic bottles and just wanted to pour it into the sand. Unfortunately our water wheel gets stuck when there is sand in it, so when Finn poured all the water into it, it didn’t go round and round.
We did a fun exercise in class centered on “I can…” and also our teachers are trying to help us move our bodies more. Darren demonstrated standing up and sitting down ten times. Phew! It seemed quite a challenge but we all managed to do it. We did some high fives afterwards.
Sui and Jamie made their remote controls this morning as they were not here when we made ours. Finn used his this 
morning and explained to Wendy how it worked. Our story today was called “What I do when I am angry”. There is a photo of us in the library trying to make our faces look angry. We sang a song and displayed many different feelings on our faces; we made angry, surprised, scared, happy, sad, thinking and sleepy faces. The story was about a rabbit that wasn’t sure how to manage her angry feelings. In the end, she learnt that she cannot hurt anyone by hitting them or screaming at them and the best way was to remove herself from the situation that made her angry and go and do something that she loved like run, ride a bicycle or look at nature. This is quite an interesting theory and one that maybe we will learn to do when we are older. When we are young, these lessons are quite hard to learn. We do know that we must never hurt other people with our fists or hands or feet. We hope that everyone has a happy "angry free" weekend!
Love Shelley and Darren