Daruma, Hagoita and Koma

It was another busy day with lots of work and play at Ohana today. Downstairs we had a busy class with eight friends and we did a few activities together with everyone and some of us did some extra activities that we missed out on doing when we were not at school. We have all done our hearts for Ayaka’s birthday which will be next week and we think that she will enjoy looking at the colours we used and the shapes that we pasted onto them. We started off our day playing with play dough and doing some cutting. We had strips of coloured paper with lines drawn on them and we tried to cut on these specific lines. The main activity that we had at the tables was related to New Year in Japan. We used pink and red markers, crayons and coloured pencils and drew circles on our pages. We started off by trying to make circles in the air with our fingers. Then we drew them onto our paper; we pasted pieces of origami paper onto the paper as well and then we had a selection of Japanese New Year stickers which we put on at the end. The stickers had pictures of New Year displays, daruma, food and other decorations. We had fun singing together and dancing to our tape with “Peanut butter jelly” on it and then we played a game where we all held a part of a large piece of material. We shook the material up and down and then our teachers held it and we had to jump underneath it. Then they said “stop” and we had to try to think of a colour, and then they covered us with the fabric. And what do you think we did? We shouted! They did this many times and we loved jumping, stopping, thinking of a colour and then most of all shouting when the material covered us. We then curled up into little balls on the carpet to rest after all the exercise and energy that we had expelled and they covered us with the fabric again. This time we were quiet little mice. You couldn’t hear us at all. We played a matching game on the mat with cards. We all had turns to name a picture on the cards and then we were given cards and had to try to match them. We managed to match all of the cards all by ourselves. We read many stories with our friends and teachers and really enjoy library time in our class. On the 3^rd floor we welcomed Marie for her first day at Ohana and also welcomed back Sophie for her first day this year. Sophie’s birthday was on New Year’s day and so we will be celebrating her birthday tomorrow with her friends. We had 14 children in today and it was great to see them all playing so happily together. On the tables we had lots of hole punches and colored paper put out for the children and it was a very popular activity. There were many children trying these for the first time and they liked being able to choose from making hearts, apples, snowflakes and footprints. The hole punches were a little tough to use and so we had to use all our body power to get them to cut the shapes correctly. Marie, Sophie, Noa and Emily wanted to put the sparkly paint on their ‘Hagoita’ (Bats) and used a whole range of colors to decorate them. The paint was a little sticky and so they used lollipop sticks to spread the paint around. Yossi wanted to build a car from one of the construction sets and Beckett helped him put a few of the pieces together. Nico is now able to write his whole name on the sign in sheet using capital letters and lower case letters and looked so proud of himself when he completed his name and the time. In circle time we started off with some dancing to the song “One, Two, Buckle my Shoe’ and all tried the actions for the song e.g. buckle my shoe, shut the door, pick up sticks, lay them straight and big fat hen. We then had a look at some library books and chose to read ‘We’re going on a Bear hunt’ with the children. It was funny that many of the children are now remembering the words. This time we started each of the sentences and let the children complete them e.g. “We’re going on……” Children finished “a bear hunt” etc. We then all moved to the tables to use the small shapes they made using the hole punches in the morning. We put together with Jenny’s help yesterday some CD cases for table decorations to be used at the charity wine tasting event on Sunday. The children then glued the shapes onto the table decorations and then also put some stickers on them to make them look even prettier. This took quite a while and so the children had the chance to finish decorating their ‘Koma’ (Spinning tops) using paint makers and we all then practiced spinning the tops using the string. To complete circle time we played ‘freeze’ to an alphabet song and Nico and Margo were the eventual winners, well done!!

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