Blue for Autism
Today most of us dressed in BLUE as our teachers requested in the journal on Friday. It was special for us to wear BLUE and think about how we are all different in so many ways; and yet the same. We all have different eyes, hair, skin, clothes etc and while these things are what we can see with our eyes, inside we are also different. We have different ways of seeing the world; we have different ways of doing things in our homes; we live in different houses, and we have different rituals and rules that we do and make as a family. And we all have so many things that are also the same! We want to be loved; we want to feel a sense of belonging; we want to be appreciated and valued, and we want people to see what we can do and not focus on what we can’t do! We are lucky that at Ohana,
these things live true for us all.
Happy Autism month!
Monday’s at Ohana, mean gymnastics and so today we spent a fun time with Miyashita sensei, doing everything that we do each week in our warm up exercises, separating into two groups and then the last game, where we pretend that the large green mat is a boat sinking. We truly love these classes and are happy to use the energy in our bodies every Monday morning, while we learn how to balance, build up our upper and lower body strength, develop our eye foot and eye hand co-ordination etc.
Besides our gymnastics class today we also had a Yoga class which Hisami did. She has a lot of experience as she goes to Yoga many
times each week and she has studied about how to teach Yoga to children. We did a number of poses which made our bodies stretch which is the opposite of what we do when we do gymnastics. In gymnastics, we tighten our muscles more so our Yoga class was a great balance for our bodies this morning. These are the poses that we did; dog, cat, tree, surfer, and mountain. We also did stretch spins with our legs and arms and we had quiet music playing in the background which helped us quieten our hearts and minds. We did some deep breathing and then we ended off with relaxation time before our Yoga lesson ended.
We changed the calendar to the month April and the date today is the 4th. Once again the weather changed during the day. We put that today was a cloudy and rainy day but just before lunch time, the sun came out and the rain stopped. Later in the day, the clouds came back but it didn’t rain again while we were at school. We were so happy that our spring picnic was on Friday when the weather was good and the cherry blossoms were abundant.
We read the book “Planting a rainbow” and later in the week we will be planting our own “rainbow garden”. Hisami showed us how to make rainbow flowers taking small pieces of paper, that represent petals, folding them at the bottom and then gluing them onto a piece of paper. We were prolific with our flower making and our teachers were amazed to see how we filled the page more and more, with beautiful petals.
We are planning to use these amazing creations for something special in the near future……announcement to be made one day! We sang with the piano in Buds Class while they were in our classroom doing gymnastics. We went up the scales from “doh to doh” and then down the scales from “doh to doh”. We listened to the Mickey Mouse march and sang the song and then we identified the feeling that the music gave us. There was music that made us feel happy, sad, tired and angry. We also sang “Twinkle, twinkle little star”, “Baa baa black sheep” and the “ABC song”.
We welcomed Sofia back from her long spring break and are still missing Nikolas, because he was sick; Laly, because she just returned from France and we will wait to welcome Yuu tomorrow and one more new friend called Carson.
Stay warm on this cool day with rainy, sunny and cloudy weather all mixed into one.
Love always the children in Petals Class.