Welcome Marc and Welcome "Mita"

Every Monday many of us actually sleep at rest time as our day at school is very busy and after a good run in the park, a hearty meal for lunch, we take our siesta and really are tired. Today we welcomed Marc, Sean’s brother and while there were just a few times during the morning when he wanted his papa, he settled well, and had a great first day at school. This morning we also welcomed Zachary’s grandma who we all learned to call “Mita”. She is his mummy’s mummy and she came from the Philippines for a few days to see Zachary and his family. We were so lucky because “Mita” came and read us two stories. The one was called “Maya Maya Jumbolaya” which was about a bird that bullied the other animals, which was not very nice. He eventually learned that when you are a bully, no one will like you or want to be your friend. The second book was called “You” and the words in the story which was written in the first person, spoke about loving you when you are sad; when you do things that are not appropriate; when you are angry etc.

During the morning we did many different activities. We helped Marc make his own placemat for lunch and snack time. He loves animals so we used animal stamps and the dot painters. He especially loves hippos and when we took out the plastic animals, he put all three hippos in front of him and didn’t want anyone else to use them. Another activity was puzzles and this is something that we are doing

every day because our teachers say that it is a pre-reading skill and we absolutely love doing them, so they are encouraging us all the time to improve our skills here. Some of the puzzles have over 24 pieces which is quite advanced for our age.

The other activity we did was decorating “Koi Nobori” which are made from fabric. Miyuki, Tokutaro’s mum gave them to us to decorate and then she will send them to Kessenuma for their “Children’s Day” festival at the beginning of May. We drew on them with Oil Pastel and then our teachers tied some rubber bands around them and dipped them in red dye. They are now hanging in our classroom to get dry and tomorrow we will use some permanent markers to draw on the eyes as they faded a little.

Upstairs when we arrived at school FJ went to the puzzle table and completed four farm puzzles. Miya and Sofia saw the Mr. Potato Head game on the table and they immediately started to assemble the pieces. Some of us dressed up in hats, wigs and jackets that we have in the dress up corner. Nico put together a boat that he made using Lego pieces and then he went to the library to play hopscotch with Sean using the circular shaped cushions. We read “The Rainbow Fish” and paid attention to the fish scales and their shape. Miya described the shapes of the scales as bumps while Jenny said that they looked like semi-circles. After this discussion we went to the activity tables to decorate our large fabric “Koi Nobori” for the children in Kessenuma. For this activity we worked with partners. Our teachers had already made a piece of card that had the same shapes as the fish scales on one side of it. One of us held the card on the fabric and the other one traced around the scalloped shape and the shape of the scales appeared on the fabric.

We then made more patterns on the fish. Tomorrow we will add dye to them just like our friends did downstairs. We took our time to see what the body of a fish looks like and kept on looking at the plastic fish that we have and books with pictures of fish in them to guide us. We are old enough to be able to do these things and also to do research on many subjects together with our friends and teachers. In the park we had fun playing with all our friends from Ohana International School. Sean was really happy to see his younger brother Marc in the park and he pushed him on the swing, climbed with him up the ladder to go down the slide and then they came down the big slide holding hands.

We want to thank our family and friends for always coming to school to share things with us and our school mates.

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