We are back at school again.......yay!

Can you believe that the month of May is finished and today marked the first day of June. Some of us changed the calendar with Kai this morning, and we realised that it is a new month. Today is June 1st. It is a rainy day. It is Monday. And Mondays mean……...Tsurumi sensei and gymnastics. We were excited to restart our gymnastics classes in a new way today. From today, we are going to be doing gymnastics in two groups. This will be the same for Buds and Petals Classes too. It means that there are smaller groups in each class and more space for us to do our exercises.

Just before we started our gymnastics class, we sat on the floor in the front of our classroom and counted how many children were in the class. Today we had fourteen children in Flowers Class. So how were we going to divide the class into two groups? We made two groups by calling a friends name and they went to one side of the room. When we had made two groups, we counted how many they were in our groups. We realised that there were seven in both groups. Shelley introduced the word “equal” to us because both groups had the same number of children in them. Seven equals seven. Then she asked us: “What equals four?” and we knew that the answer was four. We did this with a few numbers. We were fortunate that we had a number that was easily divisible by two, so that we could make two equal groups for gymnastics.

We also played a game with the letters of the alphabet. First we tried to find all the magnetic letters but we noticed that some were missing. In the end we were able to find almost all of them except for the letter “I”. We counted all the letters and William and Rafael were accurate with their counting, finding 26 letters in the English alphabet. When we counted them, it was easier for us when Shelley grouped them in colours, otherwise it was a little bit of visual overload. In the end we were all given a letter of the alphabet for our next game.

We forgot to mention that we welcomed Eddie, Nanako, Ryoma and Keita to our Zoom session and we also welcomed back Kensei and Kano to Flowers Class. We always get so excited when we see our friends, especially after a long time.

Our Zoom friends were with us when we sang our good morning song using the letters of the alphabet and then they went with the first group of Flowers friends and they participated in the gymnastics lesson.

Our gymnastics lesson included warming up our bodies with side to side exercises. We did jumping from side to side, running from side to side, moving like a bear, and once we were all warmed up, we played fun games. We love the kaminari game, and always love to scream when we hear our sensei say either “kaminari” or “karasu”. When we hear “kaminari” we have to lie on our belly button and when we hear “karasu” we have to run away from him and try not to let him catch us. Both groups did the lesson with our teachers and friends using letters of the alphabet and different professions and the gym class. We alternated the times in order to keep our physical distancing.

    Our alphabet game went like this: We each received a letter of the alphabet which we looked at secretly. Then we looked at some figurines that indicated certain professions. Our task was to try to match the letter that we had with one of the professions e. g. Benjamin had a “m” and he chose the “mechanic”; Eisuke had a “j” and he chose “Jogger”; William had a “b” and he chose “brother” etc. Some of the figurines did not have a specific job so we made one up. We were extremely creative. Once we had all selected a profession we went to the white board and wrote our profession down. Here in this picture you can see how we used our skills in phonemic awareness to write the words. We think that you can decode all of our words here.

Next week when we settle into our usual routine and longer days, we will be eating snack and lunch and we are looking forward to seeing our new screens for our tables. Shelley will go and pick them up from Joyful Honda in Mizuho, which is quite far away, tomorrow afternoon. The screens will protect us when we do activities and when we eat meals. We are so glad that our school has put so much thought into making sure that when we came back to school, we would be safe.

During the morning, we continued working on an activity that we started last week. We can’t tell you in detail what it was but it involved drawing, writing and having a photo taken! Hmmmmmm, you may be wondering! We are sorry but certain things we need to keep a secret as the surprise is so special.

Here is one of our conversations that we had this morning:

Shelley: Do you know what’s today

Ryoma: It’s not May

Shelley: What is it?

Eddie: June

Keita: It’s number 1

Shelley: What’s the other name of the day?

Keita: It’s Monday. We go back to school.

Eddie: Kaji sensei comes

Sota: Tsurumi sensei

 And then we counted the letters of the alphabet on the floor.

Shelley: What could you be if your profession starts with an “m”?

Rafael: Mechanic

Lisa: When a car is broken, he fix it.

Sara: A “p” is for pilot like my dad. He fly an airplane

Shelley: Must you be a boy or girl to chose these professions?

Rafael: A girl and a boy can be it

Sara: A doctor help people when they’re sick.

Lisa: The one can be for the teeth

Sara: A dentist

Rafael: I like to go to the dentist like him because he have toys

Sota: My mummy went to the dentist

Shelley: What is a chef?

Shinji: He makes food or drinks

Sara: A librarian has lots of bookd

Rafael: She’s a teacher

Lisa: Like Maryna (she had blond hair)

 We love having gymnastics again and look forward to welcoming all of our Flowers Class friends back to school when they are ready to return.

Love always

All the children in Flowers Class