Which ones are farm animals?

We hope you all had a great weekend and enjoyed the sunshine yesterday. We had a great morning today and although the rain had started we were able to exercise with our weekly Japanese gym class. On the table Nanako had set up the beautiful nests we started last week with balloons inside. They had time to dry over the weekend and we needed to work on the inside today. There was a small problem in that the nests had the balloon inside to make the shape. We got a toothpick and popped the balloon which was a little scary but made us all smile! Once the balloon was removed we could add some twigs, cardboard and leaves to the inside of the nests. On the table next to it Adam and Alexis added some color to the paper clay farm animals they made last week which are now dry. We used paint markers to put on the color and then added small wiggly eyes. Once the paint had dried a bit we moved them to our small farms we have each been making. Jessica, Lucinda and Tokutaro wanted to make the larger Styrofoam animals for the group farm. We first looked in the farm animals book to see which kind of animals we would like to make. Lucinda made a horse, Jessica a cow and Tokutaro a border collie. We used the special Styrofoam cutter with the teachers help and then used paint markers to decorate them. To finish them we added some wiggly eyes and put our name son the back. Alexis made a big cake with the yellow playdough by cutting sheets of playdough into heart shapes and placing them on top of one another. On the carpet area Nile used the newly sorted Lego blocks to build on the special boards while Eito, Adam and Tokutaro built towers from the wooden colored cubes. Marc and Lucinda enjoyed building a castle with the larger wooden blocks while Abby enjoyed doing the new animal puzzle. Riko enjoyed showing Sara her life book on the carpet and Sara asked Riko the names of the people in the pictures and Riko told her nicely who they were. After eating our yummy snacks we started a wonderful book which Lucinda brought to school all about farm animals. As we were reading we stopped and made the animal noises in the pictures and ten compared the sounds in English and Japanese e.g. Woof, woof….Wang, wang for the dog, Meow, Meow….Nyar, Nyar for the cat. Soon it was time for today’s Japanese gym class and Miyashita Sensei started with some jumping warm up exercises and balancing. We jumped like rabbits and like frogs before trying our table pose. We had to listen carefully for the whistle to make groups of the same number and then got into groups of two to try jumping over our friend’s legs and then hopping around them. Finally we played a thunder and lightning game where we needed to listen and then make pairs with our friends facing each other or back to back. Thank you Miyashita Sensei. We continued our farm animal book from earlier and really enjoyed making the sounds of the animals in both English and Japanese. We then did an identification and matching game with some animal cards. The cards are white with the shape of an animal cut from them. Some of the animals are from the jungle, some are from the grasslands and some are from the farm. First we needed to look carefully at the animal to see if we could identify it and then place it onto a ‘Farm Animal’ paper or the ‘Others’ paper. We then got the pieces from the inside shape and matched them with the external shaped cards. The cards were quite small and so we needed to look carefully to get the correct match. Have a great afternoon.