We love outdoor play

Wednesday means music with John and Wacky Wednesday. Today was not so wacky! We loved our music lesson and were happy to learn a new song. We started off with breathing exercises by holding our tummies and feeling them get bigger when we breathed in and smaller when we breathed out. John said that breathing properly and making the correct shape of your mouth is very important when you are singing. Another exercise was popping our lips. We stood up straight and tall, lifted our heads up to the sky and popped our lips. Then we looked down and popped our lips again. Then we put our hands near our tummies and sang “doh, ray, mi, fa, so la, ti, do” all the time lifting our hands as we sang each note. We did the same thing coming down the scales. We all had a turn to sing the scales by ourselves. You can imagine how long it took to get through everybody singing by themselves, because there are so many children in our class. Even our teachers sang by themselves. Then we sang together like a choir. We tried to remember to make the shape of our mouths like a long “O”.

The next part of our lesson was making rhythms with parts of our body. We clapped our hands for “taa, taa, taa” and then made running feet on the spot for “ti, ti, ti, ti, ti” which was a faster rhythm. John alternated between the two rhythms. When John wanted us to stop, he put his finger next to his mouth to show us that we had completed our rhythms. And of course we all understood his instructions. We practiced this a few times.

Did you know that you can make loud sounds and soft sounds. The way that we learnt this was when John gave us clues with his hands. When John put his arms out wide, we sang loudly and when he put his hands together, we sang really quietly. The first time, he sang with us and the second time we sang by ourselves and watched his hands to get clues. He was like a conductor with an orchestra.

He taught us a new song called “Bella Mama”. It went like this

“Bella Mama, Bella Mama, yay

Bella Mama, Bella Mama, yay

Bella Mama, Bella Mama,

Bella Mama, Bella Mama,

Bella Mama, Bella Mama, yay”

John divided us into two groups to sing the song. We sang together and then sang a “canon”. Towards the end of the lesson, we went back to making a large circle with everyone and we sang with the guitar. We sang “Goodbye, my friends”.

Thanks John for a fabulous lesson! We love you!

We sang “Heads and shoulders” just before we went outside to play in the park. Hisami taught us right and left when we took our shoes off to go to the park.

We focused on our eyes today as something that can identify us; and we all took photos of our friends faces. We asked them to be serious and to try not to smile or laugh so that we can use these same pictures for when we want to use mouths, as our facial features that identify us. Our teachers then made folders on the computer with eyes, noses, mouths and we will use these later on to see if we can guess who are friends are by these facial features. They printed our eyes and we will look at them tomorrow.

“What are our eyes for, what are our eyes for, what are our eyes for?

Tell me so!”

The children told us that: Eyes are for looking at a dinosaur; eyes are for looking; we look with our eyes; maybe we can close them; when we are sleeping; when we close our eyes, we cannot see the book.

This morning we had fun painting on a large piece of paper. We will use this as a work in progress and work on it over the next week to create something. We are not sure what it will be or can be or may be! That’s the fun of creativity and focusing on the process and not the product. 

We spend every day working on puzzles and our teachers have observed that many of us can do puzzles with up to 100 pieces already. We are able to sit and concentrate for a long time, until we have completed them. We work together in teams with our friends and co-operate with one another, as we put the pieces together.

We had a great time in the park and today, we all went and played in the green area as well as on the equipment. You can see from the photos what we did. Thanks for another fun day with our Flower Friends and Teachers

XOXOXO all the children in Flowers