All smiles on Monday morning

Monday, January 26^th, 2015 We had a wonderful start to the week, which is the last week in January, with Tanaka sensei. He introduced us to some new exercises and he played some music in our class today. There was background music to start and then Tanaka sensei played music for a “freeze” game. It didn’t work so well because we were so excited and our voices were really loud which made it hard to hear the music at all. So instead of using music, we just moved around the room and when we heard the whistle, we had to “freeze”. We did our usual warm up exercises starting with our hands, then our arms, our heads, standing and balancing on one foot with our arms at the side and making the table position with one leg up.

We did the bunny walk, the crocodile walk, the bear walk and the frog jump. The gorilla game was one of the new games that we played today. We had to walk around the room and when we heard Tanaka sensei who was the pretend gorilla counting ichi, ni, san, chi, go……..he added ‘rilla’ to the end of ‘go’ which made the word gorilla. This was our cue to lie down as quickly as we could and pretend that we were sleeping; so that the gorilla could not find us. We tried to keep as still as possible when we saw the ‘gorilla’ looking for us.

The next game was a jumping game, where we had to jump in between Hisami’s legs, just as Tanaka sensei demonstrated and once we had jumped in the middle of her legs, we went to Tanaka sensei and did a somersault on the mat. The last game was the “Ninja” game. This was really fun as we had to pretend that we were “ninjas” and we tried to keep the pose that Vincent is doing in the photo. We walked around the room like a ‘ninja’ and when we heard the whistle blow, we had to touch the wall with our hands; touch the wall with our bottoms; put our tummy on the wall etc. We loved the game and hope that we can play it again tomorrow, when we have our second gymnastics class in one week. If you look carefully at vincent’s hands, this is how you too, can make yourself look like a ‘ninja’.

We started off the day doing some cutting activities. Our teachers are trying to reinforce certain shapes so they chose a circle, triangle, square and diamond and gave us each a piece of paper with these four shapes on it. Our task today was to name them and also to cut them out. Most of us are able to follow lines when we are cutting. We know how to turn the paper rather than our hands, when we get to corners and will continue to cut some more shapes tomorrow.

This morning we only had one activity at the tables, because we had to prepare the class for gymnastics. When our friends from Bud’s class came upstairs for their lesson, we went downstairs to their room, to have snack and then read books. We like going to their classroom as they have different books in their library and we enjoy reading them. We noticed that our library is growing and growing and we are really happy about this. Our teachers have been covering our new books, that some of us donated to our class when it was our birthday. They are covering them to protect them, so that they last a long time.

During the morning we were glad that the weather was clear and we could go to the park. The weatherman apparently said that today was not so cold…..hmmm….we are not sure what they think cold is!

We have been really busy doing puzzles at the end of the day and look forward to making them when we get up for rest time. Koh and William B did theirs really quickly and wanted to do more and more. Tomorrow we think that our teachers need to give us ones with more than 100 pieces in them.

We hope everyone stays warm tonight and we look forward to seeing you all tomorrow.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel