There are seven days in a week......................

We had a full house this morning when we welcomed Lola back from her holiday, and Rian, and his mum and dad for their first day at Ohana International School. We had a busy day completing most of the activities that we started off with, last week, giving our new friends the opportunity to work on their tasks as well. We now all have our very own placemats which are coming in really handy at snack and lunch times. Some of us recognize our names already and some of us are still learning them. We are slowly learning about the different job options that we have to choose from, in our class. Our teachers are making a new Morning Jobs chart and we will talk about the different jobs in class later this week.

We took a photo of Rupert's indoor shoes for our new Morning Jobs poster

 We played with our home made orange play dough and filled containers with little balls. We made shapes with it and we rolled it into pancakes. We made interesting shapes again using the shape cutters as well as creating our own shapes. Some of our friends played with the small bees and the bee hive. They said that the bee from the puppet area was the mummy bee and was looking for the baby bees. Every time the mummy bee found a bee, they put the little bee inside the bee hive.

We sat together and read some books in the library. One of them was a book that required us to do actions, but we were sitting down. So we stood up to do some of the actions. The books is called “Head to Toe”. Some of the actions can be done when you are sitting however some cannot e. g. we stood up when we stretched our back like a cat, stomped one foot like an elephant and bent our knees like a camel. Shelley saw real elephants when she went on holiday in Africa in summer and she also rode a camel in the sand dunes in Namibia. The actions that we sat for were “thump my chest like a gorilla”; “wave my arms like a monkey”; “bend my neck like a giraffe” and “turn my head like a penguin”. We love anything to do with animals. We sang “Old MacDonald had a farm” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep”. We also sang our regular songs e. g. “Hello”, “Let’s all hold hands in a circle”; “There are seven days in a week” and of course our snack and lunch time songs.

We did a slightly different ritual around looking for our names today. We started singing our “Hello” song and when we had finished singing “My name is…………” we went straight to the magnet board and looked for our names. Then we went to wash our hands to get ready for snack time. We are slowly learning about jobs in our classroom, from our friends who are “old timer” Petals Class students. They choose their jobs in the morning when they come to school. Our teachers feel that it is the beginning of the year, so it is okay if only some of us have jobs. We will learn about this extra in our schedule on Monday, with the new Morning Jobs poster.

 Something that our teachers really appreciate in us is when they see us being helpful to our friends. They feel that this is a really important social skill and will be something that will help us as we get older.

We like to count the number of children in our class and today there were so many. We counted 16, which is the maximum number of children that we can have in our class on a day. We had to accommodate many different personalities and abilities and we are glad to have such a great group of friends from so many countries, in our class. We sang

“I’m looking to see who is tapping their knees

Tapping their knees x 2

I’m looking to see who is tapping their knees

And says: “Ohayo gozaimasu” to our friends”

We do many actions when we sing this song and we also sing “good morning” in many different languages. We sang in English, Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese, Tagalog, Hindi, Spanish, German, Korean, Afrikaans and Australian”. When you say “hello” in Australian you say “G’day mate”. We laugh when we do this one.

We want to thank our teachers and friends for another fun day in class and we look forward to sharing many more interesting fun days with them.

All the children in Petals Class.