Ninja Gym and Mars

We hope you all had a great weekend and enjoyed the good weather. Today when we arrived we saw a game we haven’t seen for a while on the table, Chess. Nile after doing her morning jobs immediately wanted to play and Nanako helped her set up the pieces. They started with the pawns as these are the smallest pieces and easiest to remember the moves. We saw how the pawns can only move 1 or 2 squares forward, take another piece diagonally 1 square and can’t move backwards. We also on the same table saw some new birthday cards for the teacher Maki in Buds class. Her birthday is in February and so we need to start them this week so that we can get them all done before February. On the second table there was a great puzzle which Eito wanted to put together. The puzzle shows lots of construction machines and we needed to look very carefully to put it all together correctly. On the literacy table Riko and Kosei wanted to write their names and practice some letters using the small whiteboards. We needed to pack away on time today so that we had time to get to the park and get back for Tanaka Sensei’s gym class. The park was quite warm and soccer was again popular today with Lucinda, Olivia, Tokutaro and Arata. We soon got quite warm and made sure we drank some water when we came back from the park. In Gym time we started with some jumping and stretching exercises. We then played a game where we put our hands on the parts of our bodies that Tanaka Sensei demonstrated e.g. head, tummy, elbows etc. We then tried some balance exercises standing on 1 leg with our arms out and balancing on our bottoms with our legs out. From there it was easy to move into our table and bridge positions. We jumped like rabbits, frogs and bears next as well as moving across the floor like a crocodile. Next we played a fun game where we pretended to be Ninja’s and walked around very quietly with our hands together and our pointer fingers together in a Ninja pose. When Tanaka Sensei blew the whistle we had to rush to the wall and stick with our bellies or our bottoms to the wall. Jeremy wasn’t quite quick enough and got caught at the end. Next we played another game where we walked and then when Tanaka Sensei stopped counting he would say “Gorilla” and we all had to lie down and pretend to be sleeping with our eyes closed. Tanaka Sensei would then come around behaving like a gorilla to see if we were really sleeping. He tried several times to see if we were awake but was unsuccessful every time. In circle time we tried to see exactly how high we could jump but we always came back down quickly. On the moon the teachers told us we could jump a lot higher than here on Earth. We looked at a book all about space and wanted to know more about the fourth planet Mars. In the book it was named ‘The Red Planet’. The book showed us how Mars has ice at the poles just like Earth. We then moved to the table to make Mars and also Jupiter (The biggest planet in the Solar System) from paper clay. We used the same technique to roll the paper clay into balls and then poked them with a toothpick to make a small hole to join them onto our mobile. We will paint them and join them this week as well as adding our Saturn and Uranus models too. Have a great afternoon. All our love, Darren, Ayaka and Nanako