Ganbatte

Today we continued a little learning about South Africa by making the South African flag. It has many colours and different shapes. There is one black triangle, a small shape similar to a triangle in yellow, long rectangles with angled lines in blue and red and a long green shape in between these shapes. Shelley helped us put the shapes in the correct places and we put glue on them. We will paste them into our portfolio/workbooks with some other pictures of International Month.

 At the other activity tables, we played with “flubber” and at the largest table of them all, we used sticky paper tape, in red, blue, green, yellow, orange, black and purple. We pulled the tape and pasted it onto a large background and we added a few star stickers.  We did some drawings and some of us also took pairs of scissors out and started cutting. We like cutting and using pairs of scissors and our teachers are happy to let us experiment with them. They remind us that we need to keep our thumb nail pointing up to the sky when we are cutting.

When we went to the mat for circle time, we sat together, and sang our greeting song where we sing “hello” in many languages. We tapped our knees, clicked our fingers, stamped our feet, put our arm over our head to touch our opposite ears, put our elbows on our knees etc. We sang hello in German, French, Hebrew, Afrikaans, English, Korean, Spanish, Tagalog and Japanese. We then went to the other side of the room for a story from Africa. It was not from South Africa but it was an African folktale. First Shelley read it to us and then we dramatised it a little. It was called “The Hatseller and the Monkeys”. Bamusa was a hat seller who carried his hats on his head, wherever he went. There was a big festival that he wanted to attend which was really far away. We thought that he could drive, but he didn’t have a car; then we thought he could ride a bicycle, but he didn’t have a bicycle; we then realised that he had to walk. It was really far away and he became hungry and tired so he sat down underneath a tree. And so the story went on, similar to the one that many of us know called “Caps for Sale”. Shelley demonstrated how straight and tall he had to walk to keep the hats from falling off his head.  Many of us tried the hats on and pretended to be the monkeys. We had fun in the park with our friends and teachers and were happy to have Rama back with us in the classroom. We missed three of our friends today and hope that they will be better tomorrow. Karl, Pauline and Taiyo, get better soon!

Upstairs, Olivia, Sophie and Momo came to the table to paint the styrofoam castle walls. Many of us added the finishing touches to our model castles. We added flags on the very top and we had fun placing them on the fake grass for our portfolio photos. On the main carpet area, we had a selection of large cardboxes like the ones we played with on Friday. Jenny, Sean, Ava and Momo climbed inside the ones that were a makeshift tower and look out area. It is almost as if we are playing inside a huge castle when we come to school in the morning.

Today we went to the park early as we had a trial lesson with a new organisation that has an exercise programme for children. It was all in Japanese and we absolutely loved it. Everything was geared for us to succeed as well as be challenged. We did a warm up with our arms and legs; did a stomach stretch sitting down and lifting our feet up; we made a table with our tummies and tried to balance on one hand; rolled backwards using our hands and then rolling forward; moving quickly and then standing up; jumping and then when the whistle blew we turned outwards; jumping again and when the whistle blew we turned inwards; balancing on one leg with our arms out; running on the spot and when the whistle blew we had to balance on one leg; hopping on one foot and then shaking hands with one of our friends; there was elastic across the room and we had to run along a mat, jump over the elastic, run along the other mat and go round like this until the sensei blew his whistle. Our friends all shouted “ganbatte” when we were all doing this. We did high jumping over the elastic.

We played a fun game called “Sweet Potato game” where three of us lay on our tummies on the floor holding hands with each other and our friends had to pull our legs to try to separate us and then pretend to eat us as we were “sweet potatoes”. The sensei was fantastic.  The last thing that we did was hold hands in a circle and one of us stood in the middle and had to try to escape underneath our hands. We loved the class today and look forward to the next one which will probably only be at the start of the new school year. We can wait!

Our book was called “Knights and Castles” and during circle time, we designed our castle using the boxes and large towers. We created a space for a drawbridge and we will continue designing it during the week ahead and then put the walls etc together.

 Thanks for a great start to the week and stay warm. We wish we could have weather like some of our friends are having in London at the moment……15 degrees, sunshine and blue skies.

Love always, Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Goh, Christine, Maryna, Sharee and Rama