Hand Prints & Gym Class

Dear Flower Class parents, We hope you all had a wonderful weekend despite the rain. It was good to see the children’s smiling faces this morning. When we first arrived we saw one of our favorite activities set up on the table; yes, painting. Next to the pots of paint were some colored sheets of paper. We could choose from orange, blue, green or red paper to work on. We needed to put our art smocks on first before starting to protect our clothes. We could then choose a color and the teachers then helped us put a layer of paint on our hands. The brushes tickled our hands a little and the paint felt a little cold but we enjoyed this. We then placed our hands onto the paper and counted to 10. When we lifted our hands we saw the beautiful hand prints on the paper. Some of us missed out on doing a self-portrait last week and we had the chance on the second table to use the big mirror to look at ourselves and draw. The dress up costumes and accessories were also popular today with many of us choosing to be rock-stars, skiers and fairy tale characters. After packing away the toys we sang our ‘All hold hands in a circle’ song and one of our favorites ‘Johnny works with one hammer’. We realized the park would be too wet to go and play but it was not raining when we finished our snack and so we went for a walk up to the pond area. The weeds had grown really high and it was difficult to spot any fish unfortunately. We soon needed to return to class as today was our first gym class of the school year. We had a few minutes before he arrived and looked at one of the teacher’s special books ‘The human body’ which has lots of 3D pop up pictures inside. It showed our skeleton, muscles, heart, lungs, eyeballs and inside our ears. Miyashita Sensei then began the gym class by saying ‘Good Morning’, and we all then did some stretching, jumping and balancing with our friends. We tried the ‘Bridge pose’ as well as some jumping like rabbits, moving like bears etc. We played a game where we had to listen for the number of whistle blows and get into groups of that number. We tried 3 friends, 4 friends and finally 8 friends. It was fun working with our friends. The teachers then showed us the body book and what the inside of our ears look like. We are good at listening and played a game next. We listened to the Cd noises and tried to identify them; there were noises such as a cat crying, a guitar being played, a firework exploding etc. We then tried covering our ears with some headphones but we could still hear the noises faintly. We then tried a final game we called ‘Chinese Whispers’ where a message is passed around everyone in the group and at the end we see if the message has remained the same. Today’s message was “Lunchtime” but somehow it was changed before the end. Maybe next time we will succeed!