Yoga Time
Thursday 19th January Well it was another cold, cold morning today. All the children arrived looking happy and ready for the day. Gento was instantly attracted to the toys on the table and again enjoyed putting the colored shaped pieces on the pegs. We also had Noah and Nico with us all together downstairs today who really enjoyed playing with the play-dough. Noah had a lot of fun pounding the play-dough flat and then added pieces of tomato and cheese. Nico meanwhile was making balls by rolling the play-dough with his hand on the table. Tokutaro went straight for the box of vehicles. He loves to play with the motorbikes and collected them all together but found his hands were too small to carry them all. Miya, Emily, Sophie, Tokutaro and Gento along with Sabine’s help decided to have a picnic on the carpet together. They moved from the food box to the oven / range and then to the center of the carpet to serve the food. Kana then got all the children together for an audio book titled ‘The teeny weeny tadpole’. When they got to the part where the animals in the book jumped they all joined in with the sounds for jumping “Boing”, “Boing”. They sounded so cute!! After snack time we played a listening game where the children had to listen carefully and place their hands on their heads, knees etc. Sometimes we would say one part of the body e.g. head, but put our hands on our knees. They soon were being very careful to listen and not copy us. We then made a circle and sang and danced along to ‘A ring, a ring of roses’ which the children loved as they all get to fall down at the end. After all that action we needed to calm down a little and so we decided to do some yoga with the class. We started off by showing the children how to take deep breaths and count 1,2,3 before breathing in. We have some yoga cards for children which we looked at together before starting with the ‘do nothing pose’ which as it suggests involves relaxing face up and breathing deeply. We then moved on to cover ‘the cobra’, ‘the bridge’, ‘the tree’, ‘the candle’, ‘the table’ and ‘the squirrel’. Each time we did a pose we all breathed deeply by counting 1,2,3. The hardest pose we tried was the tree as it involves standing on one leg and having good balance. We are so proud of them, they all tried really hard and managed to hold the poses. The park was old but fun. Tokutaro and Noah decided to play with the ball on the concrete slide with one of them at the top and the other at the bottom. Gento and Nico were playing with the sand and toys in the sandbox together and took it in turns to pour sand into the top of the spinning toy. Miya, Emily and Sofia looked for stones which they put into a pot as food. A fun day was had by all! Have a great afternoon, Kindest Regards, Darren, Kana and Sabine.