Twister fun and pond visit

We had a nearly full complement of 16 children today with only Jennifer out today. Unfortunately she has a cold and we wish her all our love and regards for a speedy recovery. We miss you Jennifer! On the carpet this morning the teachers had put out a wonderful game called ‘Twister’. This is a lot of fun and we tried to remember which hands and feet are left and right. We had Lucinda spin the wheel and then we tried to put our hands and feet on the correct colors. On the table we saw that our paper clay planets that we made yesterday had dried. We knew that Mars is also called the red planet and so we painted it red using paint markers. We also needed to paint our planet Jupiter which had also dried. We could choose any color we wanted for this planet. Some of us chose black which looked good on the white table but we soon realized would be very hard to see in the dark of space. On the second table Noa made a rocket to go with her class mobile. She chose blue origami to make the body and pink to cover the fins. It looked really pretty and the teachers will put it up today with our friends mobiles. Also on the second table we worked on special birthday cards for our friend’s birthdays in February. The morning was very rainy but by the time we had packed away the toys and had our snack the sun had come out. When we looked at the ground though it was still very wet and so we decided to go for a walk rather than go to the park. We went to the small pond just near the temple and were surprised to see lots of small fish, two larger orange Koi and then just as we were leaving we spotted a turtle in the water too. We walked back quickly and arrived ready to have our special gym class with Tanaka Sensei. We started the session with our usual warm up exercises and stretching before playing a walking fast or slow game. We needed to wait for Tanaka Sensei to give the instructions and then change quickly from fast to slow. We also played the animal game where we had to pretend to be bears and crocodiles. The teachers also helped by opening their legs really wide so that we could crawl through. We then played a third game where we had to get into groups depending on how many fingers Tanaka Sensei was holding up. Finally we again pretended to be asleep so that Tanaka Sensei acting as a crocodile wouldn’t eat us. Ayaka then read us a great Japanese book all about 3 beautiful white sheep. We came to the small art table 4 at a time while Ayaka was reading to see Darren who showed us a graphics tablet which we will use to make our own star picture this week. The graphics tablet uses a special stylus to make our pictures and we are looking forward to trying this. Have a great afternoon.