Rain or shine, everything is fine

Monday, February 23rd, 2015 It was raining when we arrived at school and then suddenly the sun came out. We were really surprised as it felt like it would be raining all day long. Hisami sat with some of us to complete our Hina dolls and Shelley sat with us at a free creative activity. Hana, Lanah and Michaela had turns to sit at the table today, because we had less time to work in our classroom. Mondays are our gymnastics day so we prepare our classroom early for our friends in Buds class. Hana, Lanah and Michaela worked in order to try to complete their activity however as time was short, we will leave them on the table as works in progress and they can complete them either later today or tomorrow. At this activity they used pinking shears which are the pairs of scissors with designs on their blades. They had some pieces of paper with lines drawn on them and they cut on the line carefully. They also used the regular pairs of scissors for cutting on the lines. At the same activity they looked at shapes and were able to identify circle, square, rectangle, oval, triangle, diamond, octagon and hexagon. So Shelley cut out a large piece of paper for each of them, in the shape of an octagon which has eight sides. A hexagon has six sides and bees have this shape inside their hives. Their cells are hexagonal in shape and they lay eggs in the cells as well as make honey in them. We usually use a rectangular shaped piece of paper to work on but today we used the octagonal one. Michaela also wanted to have a hexagon so she did two pictures today.

The bumpy designs on the pinking shears have names; they were called daisy, dragon back and bounces. In our gymnastics class, we did the usual warm ups pretending that we were animals. When we did the Ninja walk, we had some options for when Tanaka sensei blew the whistle. We walked around pretending that we were Ninjas and when we heard the whistle we had to make ourselves look like a butterfly and the second time, we had to stand against the wall. We walked around the room trying to look like dinosaurs, stomping our feet and roaring. Then we did another dinosaur walking game where we had to listen to another instruction. When Tanaka sensei blew the whistle, we had to lie down and pretend that we were sleeping. The new game that we played today was with our circular shaped cushions that we pretended were wheels. We made two teams with four children in each team. We stood behind one another and waited for our turn. Our task was to roll our cushion to the other end of the room. We did this successfully however the next part of this game was really difficult. In front of each line, was a rectangular shaped cushion, standing up. Now we had to role our cushion and try to knock it over. The tricky part was that sometimes the cushion went skew or it brushed just past the rectangular one. We loved this one. We had to then pick up the cushion and go back to our line and stand behind the child who was at the back.

We held hands in a circle and Tanaka sensei asked us what we want to say when we make a big circle and what we want to say when we make a small circle. We chose doughnut for the big circle and jelly for the small circle. When he said jelly, we walked in slowly and made a small circle, and when he said doughnuts, we held hands and made the biggest circle that we could. There was another fun game using the cushions however, since we used only seven cushions, one person was always without a cushion. We used only green and red cushions and learnt “aka” and “midori”. We could choose a colour and when we said that colour, those children who were sitting on the same colour that we said, had to get up and we shuffle around to find another cushion. The person who said the colour also had to find one. So now a new child was without a cushion. They had to say a colour and then the same thing happened.

We played a wonderful game on the mat after we had taken our roll call. We first looked at shapes and pointed at one that we knew, using the pointer finger. We concentrated a little more on the hexagon and the octagon. Then Hisami and Liezel collected seven objects from around the room. We first laid five onto the carpet and looked at them carefully. Then we covered them with our new jigsaw puzzle blanket. Shelley removed one object and placed it into a little bag. We then had turns to guess which one was missing. The second game was adapted from the first however this time, we had to feel the objects that were under the blanket and guess one of them and bring it out to show us. It was fantastic to see that all of our friends guessed correctly.

The concepts that we focused on which lead us up to this game were “under and over”. Thanks for a great day playing and learning. Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel