Happy birthday Miyu chan
Today it was Miyu’s actual 4th birthday. She celebrated her birthday with William L earlier in the month, so today at school, was just like an ordinary day for her and all of us. We were really happy to sing to her during the day and make a fuss of her, on her special day. During the morning, we worked at the tables making something for so many 
special people in the class. We prepared a card for our mums who are coming to teach us something else about Japan tomorrow; we made something for Vincent and Mika as they are both going to Japanese school full time from April; we are making a card for Ayaka to surprise her to say congratulations for her wedding and we 
are preparing birthday cards for our friends, in advance. Every day we have many things to do and activities to complete, all the extra things that we make, we need to time doing them carefully. If we prepare in advance, then we don’t have to worry.
The first activity that we did was complete cutting out pictures for our International month displays in our workbooks/portfolios. The 
second one that we did was draw pictures for Vincent and Mika so that we can make something special for them and the third activity was continuing our science experiment on colours using coffee filters and water. Miyu and Vincent poured some water into cups and added food colouring to see what happens to the water. They chose one colour first and then two colours to see what colour you can create from two colours. Miyu added blue to red and made purple and Vincent added red to yellow and made orange. They 
painted on a piece of newspaper to see what the colours looked like and added some more powder if they wanted the colours to be stronger. During circle time, we sang an action song that introduced us to some names of body parts that we are not familiar with. We touched 
our ankles which is the part where your leg joins your foot; we touched our wrist which is the part where your arm joins to your hand; we touched our chest and pretended that we were gorillas; we pointed our elbows to the sky and then to the walls; we touched our eyebrows and eyelashes sang good morning in many languages; French, German, Hebrew, English, Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog and Spanish.
If our teachers ever took away our imaginative play area, we would be so upset. It is an integral part of our day and some of us dress up as princes each and every morning. Some of us fill bags with things like mobile phones, fruit, 
vegetables and jewelry and we head off to the office! We also love the wallets and really appreciate how much value our teachers and Ohana International School places on play and how they integrate it into our learning.
Since art is another key component of our days at school, we loved the fact that Vincent gave us a book about two famous artists. The book is called “Pigasso and Mootisse”. It is a story about a pig and a bull that loved painting and being creative. They didn’t do anything that pigs or bulls did but spent time painting. Once they became famous, trouble started because everyone wanted their art and to take their photographs etc. They ended up being jealous of one another……the story goes on and the message that we learnt from it is that even though someone does things differently from you, you can still like them and learn from them. Our way is not the only way; there are many ways and we need to respect them, value them and appreciate them, even though they are not our way.
We looked at the levels of coloured water from yesterday and didn’t see much difference. We will look at them again and see if there has been a change. We noticed that the cups with coffee filters in them were now empty. We look forward to our lesson on Somen with Mako and Mina san tomorrow; discovering something else about Japan, the land where we all live.
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel