Building Bridges!

We hope you all had a great weekend and enjoyed the clear days and wonderful sunshine. It was a great way to start the weekend hearing about the new baby arrival for Shruti & Vikas as well as Pooja’s birthday & the Girls Day festival on Friday. We again wanted to see what was in the carpet area to play with today. Last Friday there were no toys or books to play with so we could see how some children in other countries have no toys and how they learnt to play without them. This was a little difficult at first but today we had a few chairs on the carpet laid out in a line just like on an airplane. On the chairs there were some job labels e.g. flight attendants, pilots, check in and security guards. We soon got to play the different roles and cooperated well even though we could decide which country to go to: America or Hawaii. On the small literacy table we used two of the alphabet stencils with colored pencils. Some of us stenciled our names while others did the whole alphabet. There was a also a magnetic letter book which we managed to complete very quickly too. On the main art tables we added some further details to our three special canvass paintings and several more of us packed our paper suitcases with passport, money, clothes etc. all ready to go to our country of choice. We found some square brown trays with strange shaped holes and pieces sticking out of them. Alongside the trays was a jug of bright blue sand. When we asked the teachers “How do we use these”? The teachers replied “It’s is up to you”. We poured the sand into the trays to form what looked like lakes, an island, an archipelago, a suite of lakes and a gulf. The blue sand looked just like the bright blue ocean. After helping with the chairs and art materials we got ready to go out but we only just managed a short walk around the block before the rain got heavier and stopped us continuing. We returned just in time for our weekly gym class with Miyashita Sensei. In the gym class we had a good time warming up with star jumps and rolling our heads around and around slowly. This was a little more difficult than we thought as we often lost our balance. We tried to balance on one leg with our arms out and we have gradually got better and better at this. Many of us can now do the bridge pose on our backs and had a few demonstrations from our friends too with this. Working in pairs we then ran, jumped and hopped to our partners on the opposite side of the room and then back again. We tried jumping too and jumped over a piece of elastic in the center of the room too and then two pieces of elastic to jump over. On the next try we crawled on our fronts under the elastic this time just like a crocodile. For our final exercise we practiced a reverse roll and then a double jump over elastic at the end. For our game at the end of the session we all lay on the floor in a circle and joined hands. The teachers and Miyashita Sensei then tried to pull us away from our friends but we held on tight and wouldn’t let the circle break. We played this twice and were all so excited to win.

Have a great afternoon,

Love,

Darren, Pauline, Pooja and all the international travelers in Flowers Class.