Beautiful flowers in the park

“Oh what a beautiful morningOh what a beautiful day” Shelley says that these words really date her and make her look “old”, because they come from a TV show from when she was little. Well, it was a beautiful day; the sun shone, we sang our ‘Ohana School song”, we did fun activities, we played in the park, we ate our snack and lunch and had interesting discussions and stories read to us.

Painting is one of our favourite activities. We were so happy to use our hands for the painting and you can see our handprints scattered all over our pages. Some of us used many colours and some of us used only one colour. You may be wondering what we are going to use our paintings for or maybe you remember that we mentioned something in an earlier journal about “kodomo no hi”. Yes, these are going to be our “koinobori”. Yesterday we actually cut out many different coloured and different sized circles which we are going to use for the eyes of our “koinobori” when are ready to make them up. We are looking forward to seeing the many “koinobori” that are hung outside people’s houses and across rivers and beaches during this time. We spent some time using sanding blocks and sanding pieces of wood. We tried to make the edges smooth and the surface. Shelley pasted a photo on some of them and we will see what happens when we try to scrape the paper off the wood, tomorrow.

Today the people who are making a video of our school asked us if we could sing the Ohana School song. So John came upstairs with his guitar and some of our Flowers Class friends who sing the song at home and school, came downstairs and we all sang together. It was so much fun. We sang with big voices and plenty of passion and enthusiasm. Everyone will get a chance to see us singing when the video is complete; it looks like it will be ready by the middle of January.

We inspected our caterpillar, which we found on Manuel’s shoulder yesterday afternoon. We looked inside the transparent container and could not see it; and then, when we lifted the container up and looked at the underneath part of the tissue which was covering it, there it was. Shelley pushed it off the tissue so that it could be near to the cabbage, in case it was hungry. We noticed that it had made two poos, so it must have eaten some of the cabbage during the night. We then had a chat about what we saw when we passed the container around our circle, so that everyone could look at it. We used magnifying glasses which made it look really big. We saw that it had many legs and it looked bumpy. We told Shelley that she can pick it up and show us, but she didn’t want to do this. She said that she doesn’t like to pick insects up and touch them. When we were getting ready to go to the park, Shelley put another piece of paper on the top of the container and this time, she made many holes in the paper, so that the caterpillar can breathe.

You can see that we had a wonderful time in the park, and we noticed some beautiful flowers. There were jacarandas with huge bumble bees buzzing around them. We could hear the buzzing. There were pansies and some beautiful irises. Our Ohana International School garden is filled with lovely pansies in many colours. Our flowers on our discovery deck outside are also in full bloom.

Just before we came back to school for lunch, we played ‘What’s the time Mr. Wolf’. One of us stands close to the net at one end of the green area and the rest of us stand together at the other end. We shout “What’s the time Mr. Wolf?” and the person says a time e. g. “One o’clock” and we take one step towards the ‘wolf’. Then we shout again and they say another time; if it is four o’clock we take four steps etc. And when we get really close they say “Lunch time” and they chase us and try to catch one of us who then becomes the ‘wolf’.

You can see us carefully counting our steps and then you can see us running away. Thanks for a great day and “Happy Birthday Moko”. We are looking forward to having another taiko workshop with Moko sensei on 6th May. Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel