And now the end is near............

The days are so busy at school at the moment. While we are winding up to the climax of our year, we are also having plenty of time to enjoy being with our friends and teachers each day. We sit with them and play games on the mat; we read stories with them and choose many different books during library and free play time; we draw and we cut; we eat snack and lunch; we sing and dance; we play musical instruments; we run around in the park and we rest peacefully at the end of our day. We love dressing up and especially enjoy being princes and princesses. We also love the fairy or butterfly wings. Today we had a special morning circle time with many new games. We all sat together in a circle and san our “hello” song. Then afterwards Shelley spoke to us about singing without words. She told us that there are many different ways that we can use our voices; mouths and other parts of our bodies in order to make music. We hummed the “ABC song”; we sang lalalala to “Twinkle, twinkle little star; we popped our lips to our “hello” song and had so much fun doing these variations on songs. Then we played a clapping game. We all said our names separately and then clapped them. Shelley started off and clapped her hands twice for “She-lley”.  Tokutaro had to clap four times for his name and Isabelle clapped three times for her name. The rest of us clapped two times.

When we went to the table for snack time, we hummed our snack time song. We are really good at keeping a tune and managed to hum the entire song perfectly.

While we were in our morning circle we also played a matching game. We each had a turn to name the picture on a card. We all were really fortunate as we had many turns and we waited patiently and listened when we heard our names. Then we received a few cards and had to find the matching card on the mat. Our younger friends took a little bit longer than we did, and they did a great job of finding their matching cards. Well done!

Darren read us a story that we read the other day with our friends downstairs. It is called “It’s mine”. It teaches us how important it is to learn to share with other people. The story is about three frogs who are always shouting “it’s mine”. They always want to keep everything just for themselves without sharing. They only realised how important it is to share and be grateful for what we have, when something bad happened to them. We know how to share with our friends and we are also learning how to say “please” and “thank you”.

We spent time at the tables drawing and completing our cards for our friends who are leaving Ohana and we did some cutting too. Nico cut out some shapes e.g. square, circle, triangle and heart. He cut the edges really carefully and followed the lines with skill and precision. Some of us snipped pieces of paper to practice our cutting skills too. We are looking forward to tomorrow and then the last day when we will sing and dance for our mums and dads.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Kana, Christine, and Rachel