Exercise time

Today in gymnastics we did our regular warm ups and added in quite a lot of hopping. Some of us can lift one leg up and balance but we are not sure what to do with our body, to make it move when we are in this position. We tend to move our bodies but not our feet and think that we are hopping. We practiced walking like a frog, crocodile, rabbit and bear. We did roly poly’s on two mats and hopped on two mats. We are really good at taking turns and know how to wait for our friends to complete their exercise. We are able to do many exercises that we learnt at the beginning of the year so Miyashita sensei has to add new ones each week. We played the Ninja game! Miyashita sensei pretends to be a ninja. When he pretended to throw his weapon high, we had to bend down and cover our heads, as if we were protecting ourselves. When he threw his weapon low, we had to jump so that it wouldn’t touch us. He shouted “shuriken” so that we knew he was going to throw his weapon. We were on guard to see whether he would throw it high or low.

During the morning we used dot markers on our large orange and black group art work. We stamped them as hard as we could because when you push hard, the paint splashes and the dots look like spiders. We used orange and black dot markers for this activity and then we did something that we will continue doing tomorrow. We had two containers with paint in them, on the table; one of them was orange and one of them was black. There were no brushes inside the containers, just a straw. What were we going to do? How could we use the paint? We have a song that we have been singing, called “Five little leaves” and in the song we blow, like the wind and one little leaf comes tumbling down. We practiced blowing because Shelley was worried that we would drink the orange and black paint. Of course we knew that we couldn’t drink the paint! She blew through the straw and so many bubbles came up from the bottom. In fact, all of the bubbles were joined together. We blew them off the paint pot and they landed on the painting. We blew them again so that there could be many bubble patterns on the painting. We loved doing the activity and stopped because we had to prepare the classroom for gymnastics. The paint dried during the day and we will make more bubbles tomorrow when we come to school. Many of us stood around the table watching because we also wanted a turn.

We sang “Did you ever see a pumpkin” and “Knock, knock, trick or treat”. Liezel taught us a new song to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it” all about Halloween. We have a few other adaptations of songs that we sing on a regular basis e. g. “The ghost on the bus goes booh, booh, booh” and “Did you ever see a pumpkin”. We are preparing for our Halloween party by singing songs and we

can’t wait to see what our parents dress up as for the party as well as our friends and teachers.

One of the things that our teachers like to encourage us to do, is sort out conflict as independently as we can. We sometimes get into disagreements about toys and want a toy that our friends are playing with. Most times, our teachers let us sort things out by ourselves by keeping a careful watch on the situation. Many emotions come out when we are in these kinds of situations; tears, anger, frustration etc. They trust us when we are in these situations as they do, at all times. You can see in one of our photos here in the journal, that two of our friends want the same thing……and they worked it out!

We hope that everyone has a great evening and enjoyed the beautiful sunny day in Tokyo. See you tomorrow!

Love all the children in Petals Class