Gymnastics, trees and Sofie is 4 today
We had such fun today in our gymnastics class playing a ball game together with all of the other games and exercises that we do each week. Today we had 15 children in Petals Class so it was quite busy and Miyashita sensei waited really patiently for us to listen to him, so that he could give all of us instructions so that we knew what to do. Our warm ups usually have us being bear, rabbit, and a frog but today we also pretended to be a flamingo. To make ourselves look like a flamingo, we had to balance on one leg, tuck the other leg up and put our arms out to the side. We also did “gu pah” jumps today, for warm up and then we had many games using a big pink ball. We first had to catch the ball and then throw it back to him. We had to put it next to our ear in order to learn how to throw it back to him. The second game was stopping the rolling ball from Miyashita sensei and then throwing it back to him. He encouraged to use two hands when we catch a ball. The last game was one of our favourites; it was the “gorilla game”. Miyashita sensei counted one, two three, four, go……go……go……gorilla and we had to run as fast as we could so that he couldn’t catch us. Of course we always scream when we play this game because we do and we don’t want Miyashita sensei to catch us.
Today was Sofie’s 4th birthday and even though we didn’t celebrate we all sang to her. We think that she was really excited to be four years old. We will celebrate all of our March birthdays on Wednesday with Sofie, Griffin and Dominik, which we are looking forward to.
During the morning we noticed something on the table that looked like a tree. This was our provocation for today. We spoke about trees and this is what we said:
Shelley: How do trees grow?
Sofia: From an egg
Dominik: From a seed
Shelley: What can we do with the seed if we want to make a tree?
Sofia: Put it down
Shelley: Where do we put it down?
Daiki: Under the ground
Shelley: When we look at trees how do you think they can stand for so long without falling over?
Many of us: They stand
Shelley then stood up and showed us how she stands up. We said that she stands on
her feet. She also moved her hands down her body and asked us if we knew what we call this part of our body.
Shelley: This is called our trunk
Sofie: An elephant has a trunk
Nikolas: It is the nose
Shelley: The body of the tree is also called a trunk but does it have feet like ours?
All: No! (laughing)
Shelley: Then how can it stand without feet?
Dominik: It has something under
And so we looked at a book about a chestnut seed and how it grew into a tree. In the book you can see a cross section of a tree and when you look at it, you can see that there are things growing under the ground. These we learnt are called roots and we cannot see them because they are under the ground. These are like the feet of the tree or the plant; they anchor the tree into the ground. It is almost like a boat; because when people are on a boat and they don’t want the boat to move, they drop a really heavy thing called an anchor, and it holds onto the sand and at the bottom of the ocean; and then the boat cannot move. With the roots firmly anchored into the ground a tree cannot move, mostly; so we decided that we wanted to make trees and we saw that you can get different shaped trees; trees of different heights too. Tomorrow this will be one of the art projects that we have. How are we going to make trees? Akari told us that the arms coming out of the trees are called branches. So we will need to make a tree trunk and branches.
We practiced squeezing the twisting pieces of paper as one of the options for making branches. Twisting can be a tricky movement for us to do so this was a great exercise for us. We really enjoy getting our “teeth stuck into things” and are wondering where our trees will take us, regarding our learning this time.
Please take care on this cold and rainy day and we can’t believe that tomorrow will be spring weather; you never know, do you?
Love always the children in Petals Class.