Miyashita Monday
What can you do on a really cold, sunny, winter’s day in Tokyo, to keep warm, have fun, play and learn, be with friends and feel loved and cared for? You got it! Go to school! Well, that’s just what we did today. When the door of our classroom opened and we felt the warmth from the heater, we ran inside. We welcomed Barbara back from her winter holidays and her mum came into the room, to help her settle. After that, she happily went about drawing, and doing puzzles which are two of her favourite things to do in Petals Class. The rest of the day was so busy and we will try to share as much of it with you here below.
In gymnastics we did our regular warm up and then one of the new exercises we did was to stand on opposite sides of the room in our teams. So one team stood against the wall and the other team stood against the chalkboard and Lego wall. One team ran to the other team and did a high ten. This meant that we had to have both hands ready facing our friends so that they could high ten us. Then there were two chairs with elastic tied around the legs of the chairs. Our task was to jump over the elastic and run and give the group opposite us, a high ten. The next exercise was that we had to pretend to be a crocodile and crawl on our tummies. We had to go underneath the elastic that was tied to the chairs and give the opposite team a high ten. This exercise was with four chairs and two lines of elastic so once we had gone underneath one of them, we still had another one to go under before we could do the high ten to our friends. There were so many new things for us to do. The last exercise was a combination of the first two; we slid under the first elastic and then jumped over the second one and then we went to give our friends a high ten. Phew! There were so many things to remember with these exercises and we all did the competently. We really loved the high tens at the end of each one.
After this exercise, can you believe there was another new one. We did a somersault on the green mat, stood up and then jumped over the elastic attached to the chairs. We did this exercise two times. The very last game was……you guessed it……………….go, go, go , go…………..gorilla. This time Miyashita sensei added “gohan” to the game. So if he said “gohan” then we just pretended to eat rice but if he said “gorilla” we had to run back to the wall where we started. We counted ichi and took one step, ni and took another step, san, shi, go, go, go, go……gorilla.
After gymnastics all of our friends from Buds and their teachers came to sing some songs with us. Their motivation for this was because they wanted to say a proper goodbye to Zoe and Yuki. Yuki and Zoe are having fun in Petals Class and their Buds friends and teachers are missing them. John brought his guitar along and we sang “Old MacDonald had a farm”, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”, “ABC”, “Sknnamarinkadinkadink” and “Ohana School song”. When they left, we sang our “Hello” song, “There are seven days in a week”, “These are my ten little fingers” and we changed the calendar. We read a story called “Smelly Big Bear”; and the reason why he was so smelly was that he never took a bath. Only flies came near him until the Big Furry Bear gave him a lecture and told him that he needed to bath, and that’s why he doesn’t have any friends. He didn’t want to listen to the Big Furry Bear but after a big argument, he did and went down to the pool and washed himself. He really enjoyed washing in the pool and every now and then, when you couldn’t find him, he was sitting in the pond washing himself.
At the activity tables, we completed our “shuji” and we did some drawing. But the best drawing was on the wall, where the paper is covering the chalkboards. We loved standing and drawing together with our friends. YeonJae made a beautiful orange flower, Barbara drew many faces with different expressions, Griffin drew himself and a line, and Meg drew a person.
All the children in Petals Class.