We started Summer School today

Summer School is here and we started off today, welcoming our new friends Kenichi and Ami. They seemed to enjoy their day at school, doing the activities, learning where everything is in the classroom, and having fun in the park. We taught them how to sing our good morning song with the words as follows:“Hello Ami, ohayo gozaimasu, how are you today tell us?” and she answers: “I’m fine thanks, arigatou” and we answer: “We welcome you to Petals Class”. We also sang good morning in different languages, and did actions with our bodies and faces. We sang “I’m looking to see that

you’re nodding your head……and say bonjour to our friends”. We bounced our knees, tapped our knees, clicked our fingers, winked our eyes etc.

At the activity table we pasted hexagon shapes onto white paper because a real soccer ball has hexagon shapes on it. Usually a soccer ball is black and white but we had a selection of different coloured hexagon shapes, to paste onto our balls. We put them all over the white paper and then

we created the shape of a ball. The paper is rectangular in shape and the ball is a sphere. We took newspaper and squeezed a few pieces so that together, they became round like a ball. Once we completed making our spheres we wrapped our piece of white paper around the newspaper and taped it securely with tape. We now have a ball to throw, kick and catch. When we spoke about soccer and looked at the pictures in a book, we

saw that you can only use your feet when you play soccer. You kick the ball and stop it with your feet and you can use your head but you are not allowed to use your hands. If you use your hands the referee (he is the person who controls the game, with his whistle) will blow his whistle and maybe he will send you off the field, and you cannot play in the game, with your team mates. This is not such a good thing to happen because it means that you have less team members, and it gives the other team the advantage. If you want to use your hands, you can be the goalkeeper or goalie. A goalie has to try to stop the opposing team, from kicking or heading the ball into the net. He is the only person who

is allowed to use his hands.

We couldn’t play soccer in the classroom today but will use one of our balls and play tomorrow, during circle time. We will also take balls to the park each day so that we can play different sports inside the green area. We enjoyed our Monday morning gymnastics with Miyashita sensei. Today we did a lot of the usual exercises that we do every Monday and added a few new ones. We are practicing our somersaults and usually when we finish them, we try to stand up within 5 seconds. Well today,

there was a twist at the end of the exercise; we had to try to stand up and balance on one leg, like a flamingo, between five and seven seconds. Standing on one leg, is challenging for us at the best of times. Our goal with this exercise was to stand on one leg and put our arms out to the side as if they were our wings. It was a bit too difficult for most of us as we had to combine balancing and getting up quickly.

You can see that we are trying our best, as we usually do.

When we were downstairs, having our snack and story time, we read many books in small groups. There is a series of little books with Mr. Happy, Mr. Tickle, Mr. Grumpy etc. and we read a few of them in Buds Class. We smiled when we were reading the books especially the one about Mr. Happy. We

learnt that little things can make us feel happy. We felt happy that we were at school for the start of Summer School today. We had a great time in the park and were glad that it wasn’t too hot today. Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel