Gymnastics on Mondays

We heard that our teachers and parents had a wonderful party on Friday night. Some of our mums and dads came home really late, so it must have been a good party! During the morning, we think that they were still snacking on some of the yummy treats that everyone ate on Friday night. Today was gymnastics as usual and tomorrow there will be gymnastics again. We love our classes with Tanaka sensei and look forward to him coming to school to teach us. Today we did our warm up exercises which include jumping like a frog, walking like a bunny, walking like a bear and creeping like an alligator. We bent our head to one side and then to the other side and we made our bodies into a table.

We played the dolphin and lion game and remembered that when Tanaka sensei blows the whistle and says “iluka” we jump like a dophin and then we says “liyon” then we roar like a lion. In all of our games, we have to listen to the whistle which is then followed by an instruction. Today Tanaka sensei told us that moving your body is a part of the gymnastics lesson and standing in line and waiting your turn, is also a part of the lesson. We learn all the time, from each and everything that we are doing at school and in our lives. We are able to follow many instructions during our gymnastics class. Today we rolled our bodies on the mat, got up and touched the orange cushion, jumped like a bunny, then touched the pink cushion and ran back to the line.

The next thing that we did on the mat was a somersault. This time the instructions were different. Once we had completed the somersault, we got up and touched the orange cushion, walked like bear, touched the pink cushion and then went back to the line. After we had all had done three somersaults, we walked around the cushions. When Tanaka sensei blew the whistle, we sat down on one cushion. The last thing that we did was rolling the cushions. We are amazed that there are so many things in our classroom, that we use each day, that have many ways to use them. Usually, we just use the cushions for sitting on. Now we know that there are other things that we can do with them.

When we first arrived at school, we went to the carpet and started to play with the train set. Shelley offered to help us build a proper track with all the pieces joined to one another. We put trees and people up and found a platform just like at a real train station. Because it was gymnastics today, we didn’t have so much time to play in the morning as we tidied up our classroom for our friends in Buds Class to use for their gymnastics lesson. They arrived while we were making our people for our neighbourhood. We all drew people using white paper and markers or coloured pencils. We mounted them on to part of a toilet roll and put them in the neighbourhood, to stand. All of our people were falling over so we chose where we wanted them to be and glued them to the model.

We sang the days of the week when we were walking to the park and Vincent told us that today is Monday and it starts with “m” (he said the sound of the letter). When we came back from the park, we read a book called “Hello, Goodbye”. They are actually opposites. We told our teachers that when you “come somewhere, you say hello and when you go, you say goodbye”. In this story, many animals were saying hello and they said it in different ways. The bear said it with a deep voice; the bees said it quickly and many of them said it quietly, slowly, quickly etc.

We know that when you say hello, you can say it many different ways. In fact, if you come from different countries, you would say it differently as well. If you come from France, you would say ‘bonjour’; if you come from Germany, you would say ‘guten tag’; if you come from Israel you would say ‘shalom’ and if you came from Korea, you would say ‘anjong hasay yoh’. At the end of the story, it started to rain and all the animals said ‘goodbye’ in their different ways. The tree was happy that it was raining, because it was getting food so that it could grow.

We hope that all of our friends and teachers enjoy the rest of the lovely sunny day and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel