People puzzles

It was a cool day today when we came back to school after the weekend. Many of us saw parades in the street over the weekend, celebrating the arrival of Autumn/Fall in Japan. We had a good time in the park playing with many different kinds of balls. We had a basketball, small soccer ball, blue ball with sparkles on it, yellow ball, inflatable coloured ball and another plain bouncy blue ball. We kicked the balls; caught them; threw them; rolled them; chased them and had fun in the park with our friends and teachers. We love swinging and at one time we were all swinging together on all four swings. Inside we had plenty of activities to keep us busy. We did an interesting activity at the tables which involved three different concepts viz. colour, shape and our bodies. The base for our pictures was a huge piece of cellophane paper. It was strange that there is paper that you can see through. Usually paper is not like this. Shelley said that it is called ‘transparent’. There are lots of things in the world that are transparent e.g. windows in houses, shop windows, glasses that you drink from; glasses that people wear so that they can see better and many other things. Sometimes people have windows in their houses and you can see up to the sky. These are called ‘sky lights’. When we looked through the paper, everything looked colourful. Everyone looked red when you looked through the red paper; everyone looked blue when you looked through the blue paper etc. Sophie chose green and Miya chose red today. We will let our other friends do the yellow and blue ones later in the week. We did drawings at our new drawing table and had a selection of markers and crayons to use.

Noah, Beckett, Finn, Nico and Jamie played with our new trains this morning. We built the tracks and first used the old trains that we had. Then we were so lucky because we have a new Shinkansen and it goes really fast! We are coming to the end of our theme about our bodies, and did an activity using pictures of people’s bodies from magazines. They were cut out in pieces so first we tried to put them together like a puzzle. Then we made them into people and pasted them onto a piece of paper. They have different arms and legs and bodies and heads. They look really funny because some of them have men’s heads and ladies bodies and some have ladies heads and men’s bodies.

We read books in the library and Darren read one to us that is called, “When I feel good about myself”. There are lots of things that make us feel good about ourselves e.g. when our teachers say “good job”; or say things that make us feel proud of ourselves; or give is a sticker; when we catch a ball or kick it etc.

We played a number game with the number puzzle. We counted all the way up to ten with the numbers in the puzzle. We danced to the music called “The body rap” and sang “Heads and Shoulders”.

In our morning circle downstairs we sang our ‘Hello’ song and all of us knew the words which made us feel so proud. We sang ‘Open them, shut them’ and ‘Tommy Thumb’. These are some of our favourite songs and we love doing the actions to them while singing. We also danced and listened to the music from “Tickle Tune Typhoon” and used musical instruments when we were dancing. We jumped up high and have so much energy.

Love Shelley, Darren, Kanako and Sabine.