Party Practice

This morning when we came into the classroom we saw the paints, brushes and paper on the table and we knew we were going to do some painting. On the small art table next to the table was a book all about animals for us to look at. We then decided which kind of animal we were going to paint and used the small brushes to paint an outline first. Once we had painted our animal we thought about where the animal lives and added the green jungle, grass on the farm or blue water. Marc and Eito painted a crocodile each, Riko a fish, Jennifer a seal, Tokutaro a tiger, and Nile a dog. On the main table we saw there was some art clay, tools and animal magazines. We used the art clay to make our own animal models. We looked carefully at the pictures to see the body shapes, tail, number of lengths etc. Jessica made a beautiful wild cat, Marc a forest mouse, Lucinda a wild cat and Wesley a Meer cat. When they are dried we will paint them with paint markers and put them on display. Also on the table we made some special bye-bye cards for one of our friends who is going to be leaving soon.On the carpet the blocks and cars were very popular with Arata, Eito and Jeremy. They built a big tower and then added the cars to it. After clearing away the toys we had our snack and headed for the park. It was nice and warm in the park and we enjoyed the warm sunshine, playing with bubbles and using the soccer balls in the netted area. We only had a few minutes to play because we needed to come back to the classroom for our weekly gym class. We drank some water and were soon ready to start. We greeted Miyashita Sensei in Japanese and then started by stretching our bodies. We jumped, did leg stretches, rotated our arms and balanced on one leg. We then tried our sitting balance where we balance on our bottom with our legs and hands in the air. We balanced on our sides and again did the ‘bridge pose’. We then did some somersaults on the mat and jumped back to join our friends. The next somersault was backwards and we then needed to jump with legs together, legs apart back to our friends. Lastly we played a game where we needed to shuffle on our bottoms to avoid Miyashita Sensei. If he touched us we had to freeze with our arms in the air and wait to be rescued by their friends. It was a fun game and we wanted to play again and again. After the gym class we looked at a book about the final part of our animal theme: The savannah or grasslands. In the book were examples of cheetah’s, lions and rhino’s. We found out lots of new things about the animals before we practiced a little for our graduation and end of year party next week. We decided who would be sitting and who would be standing for the songs and then practiced our Ohana song. Darren went to the other end of the classroom to check he could hear our nice singing voices. We did a great job and then sang two Japanese songs too as well as one of our favorite songs ‘Johnny works with one hammer’. We will be practicing every day until the party but would like to keep some of it as a surprise for our mummies and daddies. Have a great afternoon,