Sorting boxes

Today is a very important day here in Japan, as it is now four years since the big earthquake and tsunami. We were too little to know about this and some of us were not even born then. When we grow up, we will learn about this as part of Japan’s modern day history and we trust that each year, more will be done to help the people there, to create a new life and work with the tragedy of the past, creating opportunities for the future. Our day went quite smoothly and we were thrilled to be able to go and play outside in the park, in sunshine. We had fun in the green netted area with hoops and a large cone and a ball. We ran around chasing the hoops; we tried to throw them over the cone and we spent time running around in other parts of the park. Some of us are learning how to swing by ourselves, keeping our legs straight when we go forward and bending them when we go back.

We did magic painting this morning and we did it in stages. We had a piece of white paper in front of us and a white pastel or wax crayon. We know that if you want to draw on a piece of white paper, you need to use colours other than white. When we drew on the paper, we could not see anything. This was the magic! Our teachers decided to let us first plan what we wanted to draw on a small piece of paper with a pencil and then draw on the large white piece of paper with the white crayon or pastel. Some of us did a great job recreating our pencil drawings onto the piece of white paper however we still could not see the picture until…….we painted over it. We had yellow, green, blue and red paint and with our brushes, we painted over the white crayon and pastel and………………suddenly our picture appeared. We will try to do this again tomorrow as we now understand how the whole activity works.

At the second activity table, we continued playing with the conditioner play dough that has some accessories. It has glitter, marbles, spatulas, spoons and forks, as well as a spray bottle with water. Vincent really loves this activity and many of us saw how peaceful he was while playing here, we joined him.

Koh and Miyu created a special sorting tray together with Shelley, during free play time. They took an empty egg carton and counted things out for each section. In the first section they put one marble together with a piece of paper with number one written on it; then they looked for two things for the second section; three for the third etc. When they had put something in each section, they made the numbers from one to ten and placed them in the egg carton. We played the game when we returned from the park. It was a counting game and a memory game. We each had a turn to count one of the sections and find the matching numerical symbol. We reviewed them over and over until we reached number ten so most of us had planted them into our memories. Then Shelley closed the egg carton so that all the numbers and objects were hidden. “What was in number 1?” she asked us and we knew that it was a marble. We each had a turn to try to work out what was inside each section. “What was number 5?” she asked and we remembered five pasta pieces etc. We remembered all of them e. g. 1 – marble, 2 – pom poms, 3 – buttons, 4 – eyes, 5 – pasta, 6 – hearts, 7 – sticks, 8 – shapes, 9 – colours, 10 – beads. Some of us remember things quickly and easily while some of us find it a little challenging. We are going to wait to make our very own sorting boxes when we have enough egg cartons at school.

We sang some of the words of a Japanese song “Agarime sagarime” which means up and down. We did it with our eyes and our mouth. Hisami taught us the words in English which she created all by herself.

Thanks for the sunny day at Ohana today.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel