Can you balance on your bottom?

We hope you all had a great weekend and were happy to see the sun come out after so much rain recently. This morning when we arrived we saw lots of activities which we started last week. Several of us today needed to make our special sports day medal and make our Arcimboldo inspired artwork using fruit and vegetable pictures to make a face image. On the second table the play-dough was very popular with many of us making little birthday cakes and letters. We completed our bottle cap mural of a fish this morning and will soon begin our full size one for the wall outside the school. Today we glued on the remaining blue and white caps to represent the water around our fish. On the carpet we saw some big Montessori counting / measuring sticks. We needed to take the sticks out of the upright box and mix them up on the carpet. We then took a stick and placed it in the box making sure they were in the correct order to complete the ‘step’ arrangement. With the sticks we saw lots and lots of colored balls to play with. There were two different sizes and we soon had them all across the carpet and kitchen play area! On the whiteboard we saw lots of face parts on lollipop sticks including eyes, noses and mouths. We had a lot of laughs putting the pieces in front of our faces and then looking in the mirrors. After packing away the toys we saw the time was quite late and so we decided to take our snacks to the park to eat together on the benches. Our snack leaders had a table each and we had a few minutes left to play too. When we returned to the classroom we saw Miyashita sensei ready to do our weekly ‘gym’ class. We started off with some warm up and stretching exercises such as, jumping, squatting, side stretches, rolling our arms etc. We then moved onto some balancing exercises like standing on one leg and balancing on our bottoms with our hands and feet raised. We then tried the ‘bridge’ pose on our backs and then worked in a big circle in the classroom walking, running, hopping and star jumping. We then split into two teams to practice hopping to the cushions, doing big high 2 footed jumps over them before hopping back to our places. We tried several variations of this and then got ready to play a finishing game. For the game we sat on our bottoms and used our hands and feet to ‘scoot’ around the classroom. If Miyashita Sensei caught us we needed to raise and link our hands above our heads. Our friends could rescue us by reaching us and lowering our hands. In the first game Miyashita Sensei won and in the second Flowers Class children won. We were so happy! In circle time we completed our own self-portrait pictures by looking at a photo on the wall of a boy. Several of us volunteered to sit in front of Darren and he showed us how using our fingers we could outline our necks but it tickled a bit at times which made us laugh. We then moved to the table to draw in the neck on our pictures. We had a good look at the original pictures we drew and these new ones are so much better. Well done to us! Love from Flowers Class Children