Butterflies in the Jungle

This morning on the art table we saw the big jungle picture we have been working on. There were also some twigs, leaves and the beautiful butterflies we made with Nanako last week. Today we decided where we wanted to put the butterflies on the artwork. We used some tape to hold the butterflies in place and then got some white glue to stick the twigs and dried leaves to the cardboard. On the table next to the artwork there were lots of pieces of green paper as well as some textured leaf stencils for us to make our own leaves to add to the artwork. To make the leaves we put a piece of green paper over our chosen leaf and then using the side of a pastel we made a rubbing of the leaf. Once we had finished we used the scissors to cut around the outline of the leaf and glued it on the big artwork. We are doing a special piece of artwork for the end of the year which is still a ‘secret’ but we started it today by writing our names with a pencil and then following the lines with a big black marker. We will be adding more of our own original artwork over the next few weeks. We hope you like them! On the carpet the trains were very popular along with the chess set which Tokutaro and Nile set up to play with. Tokutaro has learnt all the moves except the king now and wants to play… any offers parents? After eating snack we headed for the park where we watered our flowers in the Ohana flower garden. The pansies are doing very well and look very bright and pretty. We didn’t have very long in the park as we needed to come back for our weekly gym class. We started off with the usual greetings in Japanese and said good morning to Miyashita Sensei with nice voices. We then warmed up with some jumping, balancing and stretching exercises. We tried our ‘bridge’ pose and are becoming a lot stronger at this. We did some walking, jumping and running work while listening carefully to Miyashita Sensei before working on a hop, hop, jump activity. It was a little difficult to coordinate our bodies and follow the steps but we all tried our best. Next we tried jumping and hopping around a cushion and then coming back. The next step was doing a roly-poly and then hopping back to our friends. This was great fun and we all had a good time with this. For our final gym activity we all stood on one mat and then when Miyashita Sensei said “Daruma San- Gets Angry” we needed to run to the other mat. Thank you for a great Gym class Miyashita Sensei. In circle time we worked a little more on our secret special surprise gift for the end of the year. For this we needed to look in the mirror and do a small drawing of ourselves. First we did a quick review of the parts of the face such as the forehead, ears, eyes, eyebrows, nose, etc. We only had a small space for the drawing but will continue with it tomorrow. Have a great afternoon.