Dressing up is for the birds

A rainy day in Tokyo means another fun day at Ohana. When we arrived at school today we saw that all of our tables were missing. This made us think about how we were going to do activities; how we were going to eat snack; how we were going to eat lunch; how we were going to draw etc. Soon we had all of the answers. Our activities were set out on the floor and we had fun using the dot markers and drawing. We have at last completed all of our hearts and we made one secret extra set of them for the beginning of the new school year at the end of August.

We loved having time to be creative with our toys and dress up clothes and Tokutaro spent the whole day dressed as Barney the dinosaur while Lily spent the day dressed as a witch. Liam ate his snack with a pink pearl necklace and a red hat.

We had a wonderful obstacle course that we made using chairs, tables, carpets and the room divider. Shelley demonstrated what we had to do and we also gave her our thoughts about what we thought she would do. We had to first climb onto the chairs and walk along them carefully, balancing by using our arms or holding onto the back of the chair or some of us had our teachers nearby so that we could hold their hand. Then when we came to the end of the chairs, we climbed down and went under the table. We crawled to the one open cube shape on our room divider and pulled our body through the space. We climbed back onto the last few chairs and at the very end, we jumped off. The best part of it all was the huge cheering that went on when we jumped off at the end. All of our friends screamed with delight…YAY! And we felt great. Our lunch and snack picnics were fun as we sat on real picnic mats on the floor. It was a bit challenging for some of us with our obento boxes however we were all successful in eating this way. Our story today was called “It’s my birthday”. Clodia brought it to school and we sat together and listened to it, concentrating carefully. Next week it will be Allie’s birthday party, straight after the “end of year party” so we will be celebrating with her on her birthday. Our teachers will celebrate their birthdays during summer school so we will have more parties before Ohana closes for the summer.

Upstairs, we had a selection of floor games set up for us as we too have taken our tables downstairs for the party tomorrow night. Miya, Noa, Margo and Emily were interested in the Twister game. They had a chance to stretch and learn about which their left is and which is their right. All the children attending today completed their nests for their eggs and their chicks. We made nests for our chicks using the end of a pet bottle. Our teachers cut off the end of a whole lot of pet bottles; our job was to decorate the outside and if we wanted to the inside as well. We used coloured markers for this. Then we spread glue inside and filled the base with lots of shredded paper which resembles the twigs inside a real nest. The shredded paper made a soft, warm nest for the chicks and their eggs. Last week we made mother birds and they were the ones that are in the nests now.

The photo of us in a group was taken because Sam, who came to play games in our class room had her last day at school. We hope that she is not too sad to leave Tokyo and we will miss her very much. Good luck Sam!

At the activity table we completed our work on our birds on soft laminate.

We had a Yoga lesson this morning and chose to do the following poses:

Bird – on tip toes with your arms back

Penguin (Sophie’s idea) – Penguin – feet together, arms at your side, head up, hands out and shuffle

Eagle (Miya’s idea) – Eagle – feet apart, arms out at your side, head down and sway

We are looking forward to our Fitness on Friday day tomorrow. Have a great afternoon and stay dry and warm.

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