Yoga at school

Today we had a selection of paints and paintbrushes on the table, when we arrived at school. Instead of using white paper to paint on, we had large pieces of newspaper. They were quite big so we had lots of space to put many colours of paint and swoosh our brushes up and down and left and right. We had a great time with a huge selection of colours. We had light blue and dark blue, sea green and forest green, orange, red, purple, black, brown, white and yellow. We were extremely careful about putting the correct brush in its matching container. We used so many pieces of paper and some of us did many paintings. We love painting and our teachers will maybe put some painting on the balcony during summer school for us. This was such a popular activity, some of us had to wait for a space.

At the second activity table, we completed our gifts for our families which are cute and will remind us about something that we loved during this past year at Ohana International School. Our teachers started to wrap them for us and all the gifts are being prepared for our End of Year Party next Thursday; and we can’t wait to see the Year Book with pictures of us and all of our friends and teachers in them.

Today, we listened to one of Hisami’s CDs with fun songs on it and action songs. There was the “Hokey Pokey”, “Obento bakko” and lots more. At the end of the day, when Shelley is writing the journal, she tries to remember all of the detail that happened during our day, and sometimes, she forgets. Like the other day, when she forgot to write about something.

Today we did some Yoga breathing and poses. We sat on the floor on our bottoms (which is how Shelley says it) and we lifted our arms into the air, making a circle with them. As we did this, we breathed in through our noses.

We then brought them down slowly back to our sides while we breathed out through our mouths. We did this a number of times. Then we raised did some side stretches and put one hand on the floor and stretched up to the sky.

We concentrated so carefully and did the poses really well. Another pose that we did was with both of our arms, reaching up to the sky like a tree. This time, we were on our knees but sitting up on them. When we breathed out, we put our hands over our legs and bent over onto the floor. Yoga seems a little tricky however, we could do everything. The third pose that we did was sitting on our bottoms with our legs stretched out in front of us. We pointed our toes towards our friends i. e. away from our bodies and then lifted our bottoms up like an angled table. We then made the soles of our feet kiss one another and tried and push our knees flat onto the floor. The last pose which was quite difficult for some of us was opening our legs wide and trying to put our tummies flat onto the floor. Miyu chan could put hers flat as a pancake and then she proceeded to show us a few poses which she said she does at home. The deep breathing when we were doing the poses helps make our bodies quiet inside.

When we were finished our Yoga, we all got ready to go to the park. Many of us can put our own shoes on now and we are able to help our friends who need assistance at this time. We had fun with our hats in the park because some of us didn’t want to wear them, so we put them on top of Shelley’s head…just like the story “Caps for Sale”.

Love always Shelley, Hisami, Liezel, Nanako, Ayaka and Goh.