It's a lovely day today
It was a beautiful Spring day in Tokyo and we had a great time playing in the park. Our teachers didn’t even wear their thick jackets as the temperature was warm and the sun felt as if it is coming out of its refrigerator.
We had a day filled with lots of gross motor activities which was a combination of our play time in the park and our KIDFIT programme. In our KIDFIT class, we continued learning about our muscles and how we can strengthen them. The exercises that we did to music included doing small squats and making our arms up and down. When we sing the exercise song, we pretend to eat good food, we also pretend to rest and when we shout ‘exercise’, we roll onto our backs and move our legs in the air. We have some great pictures of us doing this today.
In the second photo, we ran around on our ponies and galloped around the room. We stopped at the waterhole and dipped our ponies in the water to have a drink.
Each time we stopped at the waterhole, someone shouted a number and we moved our ponies according to the number e. g. we drank water five times, we stroked our ponies ten times, we bent backwards three times etc. We had a tug of war with our teachers and our friends and we pulled and pulled as hard as we could.
We balanced a ball on a tennis bat and then we hit the ball over arm and under arm. We know what to do with the equipment when we are finished using it and pack everything away in the correct containers.
Downstairs we threaded plastic shapes onto laces and we cut out circles. We love practicing our cutting and want to cut out something specific rather than just cut. One of the aspects to our theme at the moment is seeds. So today we shredded coloured tissue paper into small strips and then squeezed the paper so that we made tiny round balls…..which are going to be seeds. We had to use our forefinger and our thumb to squeeze the tissue paper. These are the fingers that we need to use when we hold a marker or a pencil so this activity was great for our fine motor skills.
Upstairs, Miya, Sophie and Jennifer came to the activity table in order to make origami fish, as this is a part of our “Ocean” theme. Ayaka first demonstrated how to fold the paper and then slowly, one step at a time, we copied her. We chose the colour that we wanted to. Nico spent time playing with the wooden truck and we have all started putting things inside the truck when we play with it. The other day, Sean placed small cars inside the truck. We also sometimes put the dice inside it. Sean and Beckett enjoyed using the trains and the rest of us always find something to do, during free play.
Outside in the park, Beckett and Jennifer took care of our flowers which was very nice of them. When the air is dry, our flowers get dry too and this is when they need even more water. Some of us played a pretend Pirate game in the park. Miya drew a giant treasure map and a path to follow in the gravel which ended underneath one of the benches in the park, with a giant “X”. This was where the pretend treasure was.
We read a book about Nemo the rainbow fish. We played a game just before we read the story which was based on the song that we sing in the morning called “Hello, hello, hello”. In the song, there is a question that we ask everyone individually “What is your name?” and we answer what our name is usually. However today, we had to answer with the name of a sea creature instead of our name. We sang “My name is dolphin or my name is shark” etc. We laughed when everyone said that their name was that of a sea creature because it didn’t seem right. We were octopus, shark, dolphin, sea horse etc. We sang “The friendly pirate ship”.
We hope that everyone had a great weekend and we look forward to enjoying the second last week of the term in this building.
Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.