Friday workout

Hello Friday! The Buds are always ready for a new adventure. We always have something new to experience at Ohana. We love to do these activities because it always gives us the opportunity to be imaginative in so many ways. Early in the morning, we saw some pipe cleaners and cut straws on the table. We didn’t know how to do it first so we just looked at them and waited for our teachers to explain how to do it. Our teachers explained it very well, we just have to put the pipe cleaners in the straw. The straw was like the design and eventually we found out that we were actually making a bracelet. Chloe and Yurika spent a lot of time with this art activity. On the other table, we found some stenciled paper t-shirts. We remembered that we have done this before. And Kaia instantly sat down beside the table and started working on her t-shirt. She never fails to say the colors all the time. For example, she would say, “it’s black, it’s orange, it’s red” and so on. She also likes to say whatever she can observe. She would utter phrases like, “Kaia’s good”, “Sorry, Kaia”. We love hearing how she plays with words nowadays.                We began our circle time with a calm and peaceful ambiance. We sat around with our teachers and we started singing the “Good morning song”. And then, we sang our ABC song before reading a book about Spot the dog. We were so attentive when our teachers read a book for us. Spot’s book series were all funny but it also teaches us how to remember the names of his animal friends.

After the short circle and reading time, we all stood up and sang “BINGO”. Bingo is also a dog just like Spot. But Bingo likes to play in the farm. We also learned the letters in his name. But of course, some of us would need some time to remember all the letters. And we all moved around the classroom and sing the song with different actions. We jumped around, clapped our hands, tapped our heads and ran. We also sang the “Gentle Hands” song. But we did some small revisions with the words, instead of singing gentle hands, we changed them into shake your hips, give a high five, shake your hands, hug your friend and clap your hands. The Skidamarink song was also to give us some chances of showing we love our friends from Ohana. We are all starting to have this special bond and we love this bond to become stronger each and every day.

Today, we really had a good singing and we made our special train again. We gave our tickets to John and off we went to Petals class for our gym class.

Miyashita-sensei was here again. And we are very excited to do some exciting workout with him. First, we did some warm-up exercises. We touched our heads, shoulders, knees and toes. It is also a good way to learn some Japanese in terms of body parts. Next, he showed the different mats on the floor. He put one blue and one red mat. And our game was to go from one color to another but we have to do some animal actions too.

We also played the river game wherein Miyashita-sensei line up all the mats on the floor and he put a little gap in between the mats. He said that the blue mats were the river and we needed to jump from one river to another. It was a good practice for jumping skills. And of course, we all had a great time.

Lastly, he put all the mats together and asked us to roll on them. Taiga and Yuu were so amazing in doing this activity. We feel that they are very good in doing big body movements because they always followed Miyashita-sensei’s instructions. Thank you very much Miyashita-sensei for the wonderful workout that we have for today.

It was a beautiful day and we went to the park for another adventurous time. Yurika, Lisa and Yuu started playing with the sand. Yurika really liked to get her hands messy today. Lisa stayed a long time playing with the sand. And Yuu went from one place to another. Chloe joined Lisa a bit later and she also followed Kaia’s lead. They both went to the monkey bars.

Thank you so much Ohana for the wonderful time. It is going to be a long weekend and enjoy your Golden Week holiday! See you all next Wednesday.

Lots of love,

John, Sayaka and Maki