Jumping gymnastics

Monday is a day when we do not have such a long time to play in the morning, because we have to prepare the classroom for our gymnastics lesson. We usually start packing the furniture up at 9am and together with our teachers we can have our classroom all ready “for action” within 10 minutes. I think that we have shared this in one of our previous journals before, but we really packing away and tidying up. Of course one or two of our friends need some encouragement at this time and in the end, we all work together as a team and achieve great results. In gymnastics, we did our regular warm ups and then when our bodies were all ready “for action” Miyashita sensei took out two mats and we had to do one somersault, jump with two feet around the chair and back to sit our friends on the green line. We had to do this twice; then we had to do two somersaults and jump with two feet together around the chair and back to sit with our friends on the

green line. We did this twice as well.

The first game we played was similar to ‘What’s the time Mr. Wolf”. When Miyashita sensei said 12 o’clock, we had to run so that he couldn’t catch us.  The next game was the traffic light game; blue means walk two steps forward; red means stop, pink means turn around with your arms above your head and yellow means go back to where you started viz. on the blue mat. We understood all of the instructions really well and played it three times.

Today we spoke more about feelings and chose a feeling for our special box. We have a set of twenty four boxes all joined together which has become our feeling box. On the top twelve rows we have the names of

feelings e. g. jokey, sad, tired, I’m not sure, happy, tired, thinking, scared, sad, surprised, I don’t like it and angry. On the bottom two rows we have our names which are pasted onto twelve boxes. Once we had completed sorting through all of the faces and placing them into the correct feeling boxes, we chose one of the feelings for our very own box. Hana chose happy, and Alexa chose “in love”; we think that she chose this one because she loved the hearts. We sang “When you’re sad and you know it” and we told our teachers what we do when we have a variety of feelings. When we are sad we make a sad face; when we are angry we make a really angry face; when we are happy we smile; when we are surprised we make our mouth in an oval shape etc.

Hisami did the calendar with us and when we were downstairs in Buds Class after snack time, she played the piano and we thought about the feelings that the music evoked in us. We thought of scary, happy, angry etc. We read books in the library too and then we came upstairs for our gymnastics.

We played with play dough and we spent time drawing in the office area. The office area was so busy this morning as we were drawing and cutting and many of our friends were motivated to join us. We spent the rest of the day indoors and had a wonderful time chatting to our friends and spending quality time with our teachers.

We hope that many of our friends who were not at school are enjoying their day too.

Love always the children in Petals Class.