Flag making and a great gym class

Monday ^23rd February

This morning Marc was really busy building the train tracks which enticed a few Flowers to come over and join. Eito got out the blocks and started making a tower by himself but then some more Flowers wanted to join and we could see some really good teamwork as the towers and buildings got taller.

We started making our own flags this morning. First we asked the children what things (shapes etc) we can see on the flags we have been looking at. “Circles, stars, rectangles, the sun” were some of the ideas Flowers came up with. We looked at some flags and could see these shapes as well as stripes, flowers and patterns. We liked creating our own flags and concentrated hard to glue on circles, stripes and triangles and draw eagles, stars, hearts, stripes and more.

Some Flowers also did the two sides of their coins, adding faces, numbers and letters and drawing patterns to make their coins.

At the park the dirt was quite wet so it was good for drawing in with sticks. Alexis drew a ball, flowers and a princess married to a boy. Jessica was busy drawing flowers too. Some children were kicking balls and Nanako was throwing them so they could head them too. 

After the park we came back for gym class and happily started our warm up. We always enjoy our ninja games too, tip toeing quietly or running with fast little steps. We played some new games which Flowers picked up quickly. The first was rolling cushions to the other side of the room. Most Flowers could roll them straight but some needed a bit more power to get them to the other side of the room. Next Tanaka sensei put up some targets for us to aim at. Flowers hit the targets lots of times.

We were good at taking turns in all the pair games we played too. The first game was with one child being a tunnel and the other crawling through and changing and doing it as fast as possible. In the second game, one child was a tower and the other had to hop around them and change over. In the third game, one child sat on the floor making their legs a mountain and the other child had to crawl through, low to the ground like a crocodile. Finally we did ‘taiketsu’ (battle) and one child had their fists curled up stuck to their chest while the other child tried to pull the other child’s hands away from their body. If they did, they won, if their hands stuck to their chest, that child won.

Before lunch we had time to update our world map. As soon as we talked about the flag that is red and white with a maple leaf Jeremy shouted out “Canada” and helped Toku put it on the map. We also found the panda bear and Jennifer said Gyoza are from China so she put the Chinese flag up. We needed to update our passports at immigration so Flowers were busy getting their passports stamped and the flags put in them to remember which countries we have visited. Jessica and Jeremy were in charge of flags and Marc was in charge of the stamping.

Have a great day, enjoy the sunshine and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

All our love, Ayaka, Nanako and Sharee