Welcome Miles
Today we welcomed a new child to flowers class; Miles. Welcome Miles! He settled really quickly and after doing his morning jobs he enjoyed himself on the carper tare initially playing with the toy vehicles and then the animals. On the big table this morning when we arrived we saw lots of brightly colored cloth. There were 3 colors for us to choose from; blue, orange and purple. We started to make some bags for our Halloween piñata trick or treat activity next week. We chose which color we wanted to use 
and then drew around a card pumpkin shape using a marker. We then folded the colored cloth in half and stapled it a few times to hold it in place while we cut. Once we had cut both pieces we used a hole-punch around the outside to make lots of holes so that we could sew the two halves together. We were then able to choose a piece of 
colored yarn to sew the 2 halves of the bag together. Using the yarn we weaved it in and out of the holes and tied it off at the end with the teachers help. We could see the pumpkin shape and needed to add a handle to hold the bag by. We chose a pipe-cleaner to use as the handle and twisted the ends to hold them in place. We could then decorate out pumpkin to make it into a ‘Jack-O-Lantern’ with a marker. We drew eyes, a nose and a mouth on each one. They look wonderful, please take a look if you get a moment. Nile and 
Ava, Olivia and Rico all enjoyed playing the memory game on the small table and it was nice to see them taking turns properly and using paper, scissors, stone to decide who would go first. After snack time we all went to the park and although we only had a short time we enjoyed ourselves. We came back to the classroom just in time to start our weekly fitness p
rogram with Tanaka Sensei. We started the session in the usual way with “Ohaiyo Gozaimasu” and “Yoroshiku Onegaishimasu” and did some stretching and warm up exercises. We then tried a new variation on the table position by raising 1arm while in this position. We then swapped arms and also tried it with one foot in the air and then the next. It was a little more difficult but fun to try. Using the cushions we then set up 2 groups and the first member of each team then sat on the first cushion. When Tanaka Sensei blew the whistle we shuffled on our bottom using our arms and legs forwards around the second cushion and returned to let our friends go. We then spread out and stood next to a cushion and again 
when Tanaka Sensei blew the whistle we all had to put one foot on the cushion. Next time he blew the whistle we raised our second foot to stand on it, then the third time, one foot down, fourth time, second foot down. Using the same cushions we then played a game like musical chairs where we had to find a cushion to sit on before Tanaka sensei could. We then tried rolling the cushions on their sides and tried to avoid bumping our cushions into our friend’s ones. We had a lot of fun, thank you Tanaka Sensei. In c
ircle time we read a book titled ‘Oliver’s Vegetables’ about a young boy who didn’t want to eat vegetables but through the week ate lots of cabbage, carrots, peas and spinach before having chips on Sunday. This was a good introduction to the sweet potato digging trip on Wednesday this week. To finish off circle time we did a quick review of the letter ‘S’. We looked at the Jolly Phonics book and tried to see as many things beginning with S as we could. We all had a try at writing a letter S and then using some flash cards we tried to guess what the pictures were as the teachers were moving them so fast we had to look really carefully.
Have a great afternoon. All our love, Darren, Ayaka and Nanako