The last day of November

Today is the last day of November 2015. We can’t believe that it is going to be Christmas to soon and then it will be a New Year, 2016. Today we had our last gymnastics class in November and enjoyed seeing Miyashita sensei after a long time. After we did our warm up exercises and a few other routines, we played “okaimsan ima nan ji” which is a game that we always play in gymnastics class. It is one of our favourites. We always scream when we run away and he chases us. We use up a lot of energy during this game; we anticipate that we are going to be chased so there is some adrenalin rush and we run away as fast as we can, so we use up physical energy too. We played with three balls; one was green and one was pink and one was yellow. We used the green ball first. Miyashita sensei rolled the ball to us and we caught it with two hands and rolled it back to him. Then he rolled the ball to us and we had to stop it with our forehead. This was a bit tricky. The last thing that we did with the green ball was stop it with our ear. We did these exercises a few times because it was quite difficult. We then took the pink ball and did the same rolling and stopping games; stopping with our hands,

head and ear and rolling with our hands. We also did a throwing and catching game with the pink and green balls. Miyashita sensei and Hisami threw the balls to us. We used both hands and pulled the ball towards our body as we caught them. We also learnt how to throw from the ball from our shoulder; this gave us more power and the ball went much further. We sat in “taiso suwari” position which is with our legs bent and our arms wrapped around them. Then we played our last game which is “Daruma san ga”. We walk slowly and Miyashita sensei stops us and tells us to do an action e. g. put our hands on our head, or pretend that we are eating etc. When he says “okota” in Japanese, we run and he chases us. This part of the game is the most exciting……

You can see from our photos how we are able to do all of the exercises and how much we are building up our strength in so many of our muscles. The preparation for our gymnastics class takes quite a while, so we have a few art projects to complete on the tables. Today we completed some of our cards for Xmas. Last week some of us made a white hand on a green or red card and today we created Santa Claus from that white hand. It sounds unreal but you will see them, and then you will understand what we are saying here!

We read stories in Buds Class and Hisami played the piano. She played sounds that made us think of animals. She had a book with pictures of animals in it and she hid the animals on each page. She asked us to guess what the animals were as she moved a piece of paper and showed the animal, little by little. The animals that were in the book were a lion and gorilla; we pretended to be a lion and a gorilla. We also did the scales on the piano using our bodies to go all the way up through do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. We started low down on the floor and went all the way up and reached as high as we could.

Akari, Lisa and Shreyas made their festive season cards using red and green markers together with red, green, gold and silver collage materials.

We are missing many of our friends and hope that they will come back to school tomorrow. Enjoy the afternoon and stay warm on this cold day.

Love always the children in Petals Class.