Basketball and soccer

Today we participated in a few different sports in our classroom. We played soccer and we played basketball. When we looked at the book with pictures of different sports in it, we turned to the page that described basketball. We noticed that it was similar in some ways to soccer, but different too. Both basketball and soccer have a rectangular shaped playing area. In basketball it is called a court and in soccer it is called the soccer field or football pitch. In some countries people call it soccer and in other countries it is called football. A basket ball team has five

players on one side while a soccer team has eleven players in a side. There are nets in both sports however the basketball net is small and is attached to a long vertical pole, while a soccer net is on the ground, and it is quite large. The person who stands at the edge of the net is called the goalie; his job is to stop the opposing teams kicking the ball into the net. While in basketball, the team has to get the ball into the net and score as

many points as they can. Basketball is played by running up and down the court trying to throw the ball into the small net, while in soccer, you can only use your feet and kick the ball.

Some of our friends made their soccer balls this morning, by pasting coloured hexagonal shapes onto a piece of white paper and then scrunching up some newspaper, just like we did yesterday. We used our soccer balls and kicked them in the front part of our room. We kicked the ball and then one of our friends or teachers, kicked it back to us. When we were in the back part

of our room we played another soccer game. This time, we had goals and our task was to kick the ball into the goals. Hisami divided us into two teams; team one and team two. We counted eight children at school today, so there were four children in each team. Team one was Hana, Michaela, Dominik and Kenichi; team two was Manuel, Daiki, Taiyo and Lanah. When our teachers were setting up the goals, Lanah reminded them that the goalie can use their hands. So Shelley put the wooden

hands in the goal area. We placed the ball on the pink button and tried to kick it into the goal. Each time that we kicked the ball into the goal, our

teachers marked it off on the white board so that we could see the score as we played.

You can see the score written here on our white board. The number on the top is the number of each team; then our names; the number in the circle is the number of newspaper balls that we got inside the bucket in our basketball game; then there are lines, which represent the number of goals that we scored and the last number in a circle, is the number that we came to, when we

added up the lines.

For our basketball game, we tried to get as many of the newspaper balls into the bucket and then we counted them. You can see the numbers underneath our names are the number of balls that each time placed into the bucket. The bucket was the net in a real basketball game. We played music and when the music stopped, it was time for us to stop putting balls into the bucket.

The next game we played was with music as well and this time, we kicked a ball around the room and when the music stopped we had to stop the ball and put one foot on top of it. This was not only good for our eye foot co-ordination, but it helped us learn how to balance on one foot. Squeezing the balls was one of the activities that we did at the table, in the morning. The second activity was opening and closing buttons, zippers, hooks, press studs, buckles like you have on a helmet and a belt. Our story was called

“A colour of his own” which is about a chameleon.

Chameleon’s change colour wherever they go, in order to protect themselves. When they are on a leaf, they are green; when they are on a cloud, they are white etc. Our teachers asked us what colour we would like to be; and what we could do if we wanted to be that colour. Daiki wanted to be pink so he sat on the pink button; Michaela wanted to be pink so she thought she could sit on a peach; Dominik wanted to be green so he said he could sit on a kiwi fruit and Manuel said he wanted to be red, so he could sit on an apple. We changed our calendar and today the weather was rainy and cloudy. We sang our good morning song and had another great “sporting” day. See you tomorrow when we will learn about tennis and table tennis. Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel