Another welcome back to school

Day two and we welcomed Ava today. She had a beautiful day with her friends and teachers and was so happy to be able to play with the big ball of yellow play dough that her friends made in class yesterday. We welcomed Gento back to school today too and will enjoy being with him for one week before he heads off to England with his family. We are all so full of energy and are enjoying discovering new things in our classrooms. For those of us who are now in the upstairs classroom everything is mostly new and for those of us who are downstairs, we have seen changes in the layout of our room as well as some new interesting things to play with. The one thing which we love using are the dot markers. Yesterday we used them to decorate our place mats and today, Ava had a turn to complete her one. We have all made new ones however our teachers are happily still using their ones from last year.

 When we returned from the park, we ate snack together in one classroom and spent time together until the end of the day. We ended up singing the snack time song twice because the children downstairs had already started eating. Our older

riends joined them and we sang the song again. We laughed because Miya sang thef word “lunch” instead of “snack”. Sometimes we all get words mixed up! In keeping with the theme for this month; Who am I? we sang songs about our bodies and did actions to the words of the songs. While we were eating snack, we sang some songs and Shelley sang “cha cha cha”. She said that she would teach us a song that had “cha cha cha” in it. We all held hands in a circle and then let go of our friends’ hands and let our arms touch the sides of our bodies. We then put our hands on our hips and sang “My body makes music” and “Mi cuepo asa musica”. We laughed a lot as we clapped with our hands, stamped our feet, sang with our voices and moved our hips from side to side. While we were at the table, we also asked if we could “Do the monkey”! This is still one of our favourite songs that we learnt last year. We learnt a new monkey song called “Monkey, monkey sitting in a tree”. Then we went to the mat and sang and did actions to the “Monkey Dance”. We did some actions where we had to touch certain parts of our bodies. Darren likes to trick us and he touched his tummy and at the same time told us to touch our heads. We knew that he was not doing it properly however we copied him and then laughed when we realised that we had made a mistake. We then sang the “Heads and Shoulders” song slowly and quickly. We get really excitable when we sing it fast. We sat with a partner and did the “Round and round the garden” poem. We had a turn to do it to our friend and they then did it to us. Some of us are really ticklish. We did the “Body Rap” song too. We had so much fun!

Some of us are enjoying using the dressing up corner with interesting clothes and accessories. Shoko and Miya helped each other get dressed and then they went ‘shopping’. In the park we enjoyed playing with the large cars and sliding down the slide like a train. We are developing strength in our arms and have learnt how to pull ourselves up onto the pole where the parallel bars are. Tokutaro and Ava wanted to do it too, so our teachers helped them. They had to hold on really tight in order to stay up there. Miya and Shoko can pull their bodies up all by themselves.

We met a new friend today called Pinky. He is a really shy dragon that comes all the way from Colombia. He is very shy and doesn’t like it when it is too noisy. When we sang our “Hello” song, he listened and then forgot the words. We reminded him what he needed to say, and then he sang the words “My name is Pinky”. We counted in Spanish up to five and then did the same in English because he speaks English too.

 It was another fun, hot day at Ohana.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Christine, Goh and Ayaka.