Luka's Show and Tell

None of us had “Monday Morning Blues” today; we were full of joy and so happy to be back at school with our teachers and friends. We missed Liezel as she didn’t come to school today however we were glad to have Hisami and Shelley with us. Monday morning in our classroom is not as long as usual because we prepare the room for gymnastics and then we go downstairs for snack time. Today was

the same except for an interesting discussion that we had to start off our day.

Last week, if you remember, reading our journals, we started making a shop in our imaginative play area. We created a shop by using the space in between the sink and the microwave area, as the window where people can buy things. On Friday our teachers created shelves using boxes and put some things on them. Luka

brought a whole lot of other things for the shelves today so we have quite a lot of things to buy, together with the food that we use when we are playing and cooking and having picnics. We had a discussion at the table, this morning, about the different things that we can buy in a shop. We said: “Cheese, sandwiches, sausage, pasta, bread, rice, tomatoes, banana, corn, ice cream, and candy”. Shelley asked us what category all of the things that we mentioned, fall under and we said, food.

Then our teachers showed us some real money and we saw the different colours, numbers and pictures. Our task then began, which was, to make money. All of us cut out circles and rectangles and put numbers on them. The money was colour coded; red was 10,000Yen; green was 1,000Yen; orange was 5,000Yen; yellow circles were 10Yen and black circles were 1Yen. We have them all ready for our shopping activity tomorrow. We have lots of bags for the things that we want to buy and we prefer not to use plastic bags so we can be environmentally friendly! We think that it is good to learn these things when we are young. When we returned to our classroom after snack time and gymnastics, many of us were asking when we can go shopping. In the end, we

didn’t have enough time but we did all of the preparations.

Our gymnastics class was with most of the usual exercises and then some new ones. Today our teachers took some photos of us sitting in the position that Miyashita sensei calls “taiso wo suwari”. This is when we sit down, bend our legs up and wrap our arms around our legs. You can see from the photos that we are listening really carefully to what our sensei is saying.

We know how to count up to eight in Japanese really well because many of the exercises that we do, we do to the count of eight in Japanese. We actually count the numbers as we do the exercises. We did jumping; hands on our knees bending and straightening; legs apart bending our knees towards the left and the right; putting our arms above our heads and bending forwards while saying ‘ohio gozaimasu’; putting our arms above our heads and bending backwards whiles saying ‘sayonara’; swinging our arms round and round; shaking our hands

and lastly, shaking our bodies. Miyashita sensei gives us instructions about what we need to do when we hear the whistle. It usually means ‘stop’. So we walked (aruku) and then stopped; hasiru (run), usage jump (rabbit jump), kaeru jump (frog jump) and kumasan (bear walking). Sometimes we have to do an exercise within a certain period of time e. g. after our somersault, we need to stand up within five seconds and then we need to do it within three seconds. Phew, this put quite a lot of pressure on us.

The new game that we learnt today was sitting on our bottoms and moving around. It was like TAG but instead of running we had to move quickly on the floor, pushing ourselves on our bottoms. If Miyashita sensei tagged us, we had to put our hands above our heads and keep still like a statue. When one of our friends tagged us, we could move again. We laughed and tried to escape and had so much fun.

Today we didn’t read more of our crocodile story but we reminded Shelley

about it. We were downstairs in Buds Class for story time so we read “Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do you hear?” The Brown Bear books that we have read, say “What do you see?” This time we had to pay attention to sounds that animals make e. g. the lion roaring, a boa constrictor hissing, a peacock yelping etc. We enjoyed listening to the story as it was similar to the Brown Bear and also different.

Luka did his Show and Tell today and it was really unique. He brought along a piece of paper with a photo of his godmother and some information about her. It was his Interview with her. Her name is Mayuko and her favourite colour is green; her favourite food is beef steak and Luka loves reading books with her. The last question was the most interesting. The question was: “What is a godmother?” The answer on Luka’s interview was: “Someone who says yes, when your mother says no!” Our teacher’s thought that it was funny but we were not sure what it meant.

Thanks for a fun day! See you tomorrow!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel