Fitness comes first

It was a great start to the new week and we were thrilled to have lovely sunshine when we went to the park. During the morning we spoke about our excursion on Wednesday to the farm to pick sweet potatoes. Our teachers told us that even if it is raining on the day, which the weatherperson predicted, we will go on the bus to the Railway Museum. We did however sing a song about it being a sunny day on Wednesday. We sang “Mr. Weatherman, Mr. Weatherman, please bring some sunshine, Mr. Weatherman; we do not want some rain, we do not want some rain, please bring some sunshine Mr. Weatherman”. Of course we stressed that we wanted the sunshine in particular on Wednesday.

We also spoke about our Taiko workshop next Wednesday 29^th October, at the Azabu Kumin center, near the Singapore embassy. We will walk there from school after our snack time. Hisami put out our circular cushions and we improvised with them, and they were our drums. Shelley brought the taiko that she had made when Ohana first started. It was made from the same skin as real taiko drums are made of. She explained to us that the middle of the drum is called the skin and the sides of the drum are called the rim. When you hit the skin you say ‘don’ and when you hit the rim, you say ‘ka’. We hit the skin two times and said ‘don, don’ and then we hit the rim two times and said ‘ka, ka’. We did this a few times and then clicked our pretend sticks in the air and opened up our arms in a pose and shouted “yaaaaaa”.

We are all now prepared for our taiko event and some of us know what to do; how to make a pose which for Moko sensei is important, and how to hit the skin and the rim.

During the morning we made our gifts for our friends in flowers class. Luckily we all made one for ourselves last week, so we were more than willing to give them the one that we made today. Hisami put them into a bag with a sticker of a Jack-o-lantern and made it look pretty. She is always so creative and we love making things with her at the activity tables.

As you can see from some of the photos we were happy to see Tanaka sensei again after a long time. We did many different warm up exercises like touching our knees, balancing on our bottoms and lifting our legs and arms into the air, making our bodies like a table, sitting in our special positions and standing with one leg up in the air. Tanaka sensei divided us into two groups; one group was just girls and one group was just boys. We stood together with the person in front standing on a square cushion and the rest of us making a line behind him/her. There were two cushions on the other end in front of us. We had to skip up to the cushion and around it; walk like a bear up to the cushion and around it and walk like a crocodile up to the cushion and around it. Then we rolled the cushions and when we heard the whistle blow, we had to stop and sit on a cushion. The last

Game we played was itchi, ni, san shi go –rilla. We walked around the room together and Tanaka sensei counted in Japanese. Because five is ‘goh’ in Japanese, when he got to five he said “go-rilla”. We then had to run to our cushions and sit quietly and say ‘shhhhh’.

We were going to use the top floor for our gymnastics classes but Maryna and Christina were not able to talk on the telephone properly as it was too noisy. We enjoy moving our classroom around and were so happy that we could do it once again. Next week we will swop classes with our friends in Buds Class so that they can use our classroom for gymnastics.

We changed our calendar and once again, are trying to work out what day comes next without going through our song. Today we actually sang our song and Lilian shouted out: “Monday”. We had a lovely time doing free drawings and collage with Lilian spending time cutting her blue paper into hundreds of tiny pieces. Thanks for a fun day.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.