Do you know what another name for your calf muscle is?

Today was a busy day as it was our KIDFIT day. We started learning about our muscles today and upstairs we even learnt the word “gastrocnemius” which in a more simple way of speaking is the calf muscle. The calf muscle is the muscle which is at back of our legs and with all of the exercises that we did today, we used our “gastrocnemius” a lot. In our KIDFIT class we did so many fun new exercises which made us use many different muscles. We held small bats in our hand and balanced yellow balls on them; we hit over arm and under arm. We had and long piece of rope which Hanna made into a circle shape. This was the pond that was filled with water. We each received a cute horse on a stick and galloped around the room with it. Then the music stopped we bent down so that the horses could drink some water from the pond and off we went. We then made the rope into a long straight line and some of us held the one end and the rest of held the other end and we pulled and we pulled……..it was just like “Tug of War”. We had to try to pull so hard that we pulled the entire rope onto our side.

We laughed a lot and each side had some teachers pulling the rope to help us.

We did a fire drill and earthquake drill with the entire school today. When we did our fire drill we had to cover our mouths with our hands as if there was smoke and we were preventing it from coming into our lungs. We remembered that when we learnt about our lungs, smoke was very bad for them amongst other things.

You can see from the photo that we were covering our mouths really carefully.

When we practiced our earthquake drill we went underneath the tables.

The concepts that we learnt today were push and pull; over and under; left and right and the most important things that we always remember is to “Eat good food, exercise and have enough sleep”. Both upstairs and downstairs we love social and dramatic play and our teachers observe us carefully here as they say that we learn some of our best lessons in life here. We do a lot of mimicking here; acting out roles in our homes and how we see things in life. Upstairs we cooked breakfast for our friends with Nico being the cook and Jamie, Jenny, Beckett and Emily taking care of laying the table. Downstairs we dressed up in some of our favourite dress ups e.g. Barney the dinosaur and the princess and we sat on chairs in a line. Lily said that she was on a train and we all bounced along with her while Sabine came to click our tickets like the man on the shinkansen.

We like to keep scraps of paper for recycling and upstairs we are getting it ready for a papier mache activity. Sean, Beckett, Jenny and Miya all took turns to shred the paper through the shredding machine. Darren reminded us all about using one colour only when we use the shredder and today the colour was white. The reason why we shred one colour at a time for “papier mache” is that if we mix all of the colours together with water, they become a brownie mush. So we are going to shred each colour separately.

Nanako read us a story called “Happy Bee” and we also looked at our bee puppet to see what things we need to add to our toilet rolls which we covered in yellow and black stripes. We noticed that bees have two eyes, two antennae, four wings with two on each side and six legs. We will work on them next week as we come to the end of February. We will continue learning about bugs and spring and gardens and flowers in March as well as going into April, when we start school in the new building. Our friends upstairs watered the flowers when they went to the park and Nico and Beckett were very careful as they carried the bottles of water from the tap all the way to our garden on the opposite side of the park.

Our friends upstairs are really good listeners and they played Chinese Whispers. Darren whispered a word to Emily and she had to tell the friend sitting next to her and so on until the word came all the way back to the child sitting next to Darren on the other side; which was Nico. The word that Nico said was snake which was very close to the word that Darren initially said; which was snack.

In circle time upstairs, we reviewed all of the letters in Jolly Phonics books one and two. We sang the songs and did the actions and then we looked at two sentences “It is a hat” and “It is a cat”. Emily knew which one said ‘hat’ and which one said ‘cat’. Wishing everyone a great weekend!

Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.