Welcome to our new friends

Today was so lovely and sunny outside, we all had the opportunity to run around and enjoy being together with all of our friends and teachers at Ohana. We were lucky to have some extra time playing with Eva and Oliver as they came to the park earlier while some of us were in the park. We are sad that they will be leaving us and any extra moments that we can have together with them, ar precious. We were so happy to welcome Andres Felipe to our classroom upstairs. He was so excited and came in to the classroom with a big smile on his face. He especially liked the ladybug, shark and alligator cushions in the library. He brought us many pictures to look at in the books that he was reading and he pointed out all the names of the animals as he showed them to us. He said: “Look wolf; look lion……” Today almost all of us played with the animals and the dinosaurs during free play time. We even took the grassland animals off from our display so that we could play with them. Ava went upstairs today as she will be moving to our class upstairs from January and she, Noa and Yossi looked at the beautiful tree with the flashing lights and then they went to the table to make a special star as well as a heart for Shoko’s birthday party next week. At the writing table, Beckett, Yossi, Jamie and Margo made their holiday season cards and wrote their names beautifully.

 During circle time we practiced making small, big and medium sized circles all by ourselves. We sanf “Ring-a-ring-of-roses” and tried really carefully to think about our friends as our circle was really big; when we fell down. We then looked at our jungle/grasslands book called “Great planet earth search” and saw lots of grassland animals. Our new word that we learnt today was ‘wildebeest’. This is a word that Shelley knows well as there are many of them in South Africa at game parks. The original word is in Afrikaans. We sang and danced to the “Monkey dance” and we had enormous tubes which we pretended were the trunks of elephants. When we sang the part with the elephants, we held the tubes up to our noses so that we could look like elephants with really long trunks. At the activity table later in the day, we chose grassland animals from the display and completed our grassland pictures. We had a wonderful treat at lunch time; Margo’s mum made us dessert! We had delicious cupcakes that were decorated so beautifully. Yossi and Andres Felipe didn’t eat one however all of us want to say a huge thank you to Margo and her mum, for this special part of our lunch time feast! They were sooooo delicious.

 Downstairs we sang our “hello” song; “open them, shut them”, “Five balloons”; “This little clown”; “Let’s all hold hands in a circle” and hello in many different languages. We had the last of our contemporary art works on the table to work on today. We had some new collage materials to paste onto them. We had feathers, small mosaic pieces of paper in many colours and some scrap paper. When they are dry we will paste them into our portfolios and the extra ones that we have made, will go into our folders. We will send home all of our art work by the end of this term. Clodia completed her beautiful star and we are now ready to finish our stars so that we can prepare them as gifts for our families.

We spent time playing with plasticine in different colours and it seems that our hands and fingers are strengthening from all of our activities, and we are learning how to grasp a pencil or marker with the appropriate grip. We love doing puzzles and we love playing in the dramatic play area, with the clothes, handbags and accessories. We still like to put things underneath the table and include this as part of our play. Our canvas is almost complete and just needs a coat of varnish or shellac and then it is ready to be sold. We are hoping that one of our mums or dads is good at running an auction as we need someone to help sell them at the wine tasting event. Story time was fun today as we all sat together on the carpet, reading books and then we all sat with our teachers and listened to them read to us. Our favourite stories include “The ABC book” and all of those that are about animals. In fact Lily and Clodia sang the ABC song while they shared the task of doing the ABC puzzle together just before library time.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.