Welcome back after Golden Week

Today was a busy day in Flowers Class and we tried a new schedule around snack time. We all chatted about this a week or so ago and our teachers want to try to let us take responsibility for when we are hungry and need to eat our snack. We were so busy making things and discussing things, that we actually, were not hungry. Some of us had something to drink before gymnastics class and only when we realised that we hadn't had snack, did we think that we wanted it. After gymnastics our teachers asked us what we wanted to do. Did we want snack? Did we want lunch? Did we want snunch? On-ly one of us wanted lunch so we all had snack and when some of us were finished our snack, we went to get our lunch and ate some of our lunch as well. From tomorrow, we will have a snack time table set up for us, when we arrive in the morning. Snack times from now on, will be any time during the morning until 10.30am. We can go and have snack as soon as we arrive at school or anytime during the morning. The table is already laid for tomorrow with a table cloth and centerpiece. We are looking forward to coming to school tomorrow and taking the opportunity to choose when we eat our snack and also whether we will eat it at all. We love new experiences!

Our gymnastics class this morning had a lot of warm ups and when Miyashita sensei felt that our muscles were warm enough, we played a game using a “pretend ball”. We pretended to throw the ball at Miyashita sensei and he pretended that we hit him and he fell down. Later on we played real “Dodge Ball” and tried to throw a real ball and hit our friends. They in turn tried to avoid being hit by the ball. Every Monday we do certain exercises in two teams. We stand opposite one another touching the walls. When we reach the wall, we always do high five to our friends in the other team. The one game that we played was the “Osama” game which means “King’s” game. We played in two teams and secretly chose one of us to be king. The other team didn't know who the king was in each team. If the king was hit by the ball, the other team was the winner. Each team’s king tried really hard not to get hit and hide his/her identity.

During the morning, we sat with our teachers and made something special for Mother’s Day. We don’t want to ex-plain in detail what we did but we will put some photos here in the journal for you to see. You may be able to guess! She also guided us as we made a menu for our Mother’s Day Restaurant. We wrote the names of the foods that we are going to serve and we drew pictures of them too.

Kai sat with us and we added to our neighbourhood pro-ject. We made another road which went all the way along our shelf and is attached to some books…..hahahaha! We placed the new pho-tos on the wall as well. We took down our Blue Art work, actu-ally it fell down and we put up our “Do a dear” song with our own words. We sang it during the morning and later in the day, we took the pointer finger and sang it again. We also moved our weather chart be-cause the neighbourhood was going over it. Our neighbour-hood has grown substantially.
Liezel sat with us and gave us all the necessary birthday pages to complete as we have three teachers birthdays and one friend, in May. While some of us were busy doing all three of these activities Hisami was working with a small group of our friends, on the floor. We want to measure us to see how much we have grown this year, so we made our own measuring tool. We used coloured paper which we stuck together and we used a giant ruler to make the markings in centimeters on it. We wrote numbers from 0 to 160. While we were making it, we tested it and lay on the floor next to it, to see how tall we are. We attached it to the wall afterwards and will measure and weigh our friends in the next few weeks.

We listened to an interesting story set in India. It was called “One grain of rice”. Shelley found one grain of rice to show us what a grain of rice is. We all eat rice and had seen one before but didn't know that it was called a grain of rice. The story was about a “Raja” which is like an Indian king who promised the people in his land that if they gave him all their rice, he would store it and share it with them. In times of famine, when there was nothing to eat, they would never go hungry because he would have the rice, in the store room to share with them. Un-fortunately, he was not a man of his word, which means that he never kept his promise, and when the rice didn't grow, he would not give the people any-thing to eat. They were so hungry! One day, a girl saw some rice falling out of a basket so she collect-ed it and took it to the “Raja”. He was so grateful for her honesty, that he offered to give her what-ever she wanted. All she asked for was “One grain of rice” on the first day and for each other day after that, up until 30 days, she asked him to dou-ble the grains of rice. Well, in the end she had all the rice and he had nothing. She was kind enough to share all the rice with everyone and she even gave him one, basket. She taught him how to be kind…..and we learnt the concept of doubling things. We couldn't fully understand how one grain of rice could become 536 million grains in 30 days. Maybe Kai can teach us in Numeracy class!

We also learnt how to play “Snakes and Ladders” and go up the ladder and down the snake. When you move your counter in this game, the numbers go in what we called a “zig zag” shape. We looked carefully at the numbers to see that we were going the right way.
Thanks for a fabulous day in class, when our lunch time became really late and we are learning how to monitor our own hunger. Tomorrow will be fun, having our own snack time, whenever we want to.

Shelley is happy that the flowers in the garden are be-ing nourished by the rain, even though she watered them this morning.
Love always, the children in Flowers Class.