Gym Class Monday (Plus Some Santa Tales)

          Good morning everyone! My goodness, the rain this morning was really heavy! There were moments when the rain fell really hard and got our pants really wet, some of us needed to change our pants because it was so wet and cold,. It was really uncomfortable Once we got inside our classroom, it was nice and warm. We greeted our friends, did our morning jobs and it was time to play! Today we had the Duplo blocks out on the carpet for us to freely build and some toys we brought from home for sharing. We continued the art works we were working on last week. Ornament making with Sayaka and the winter snowflake art with Pauline.

We had a slightly shorter free play time because it was Monday and Monday means Miyashita-Sensei for Gym! However the teacher that arrived at Petals was not Miyashita-sensei. Our teachers told us that Miyashita-sensei was sick today so we had Kaji-Sensei substitute for him. Kaji-Sensei, much like Miyashita-sensei, was very gentle and energetic. It only took a few minutes for us to warm up to Kaji-Sensei and start having fun like usual. Kaji-Sensei did our usual warm up routines, but with a little unique twist to them. He was silly sometimes so we all had a good laugh with him. One of our favorite activity was spinning on the floor on our bottoms and tummies. Thanks to our new floors we can spin really, really fast! Another fun activity we did was following Kaji-Sensei around the classroom acting like animals. We then practiced our front rolls again and then played the Karasu game. Kaji-Sensei would have us jump together as we said, “Ka, Ka Ka, “ but when he said, “Karasu!” we would have to hid our bottoms by sitting down. Or he could say, “Kaminari” which is lightning and we had to hide our bellybuttons.

After saying good-by and thank you to Kaji-Sensei we gathered into a circle with Nimo to do a few breathing exercises to help us calm down. Once we were calm from our fun and exciting gym class Pauline joined us and began our circle time. She told us that Santa Claus was coming to Ohana! Pauline talked about how Santa is always watching us and checking to see who is naughty and who is nice. Since we have the special opportunity to meet Santa Claus sometime this week, we have all decided to make a card for Santa with something we want for Christmas. She also read the book called “Waiting for Santa” by Nancy Parent. It was a short story about how 2 children couldn’t sleep as they were excited for Santa Claus, so they decided to wait for him– but they ended up eating the cookies and milk that they prepared for him. When they finally fell asleep, Santa came to put their presents under a tree. The End. We also decided that we can prepare milk and cookies for Santa, too– and we’ll do our best to resist the urge to eat it!

That’s all for our first Monday of December. How about you? How was your day? We hope you were warm and dry just like us!

Love,

All the excited children in Petals Class