Move your body on a Monday

Today was the first day of September and we had a different Monday routine. Today was our first day of gymnastics and we loved it. We met our teacher, Tanaka sensei who is young and full of energy. He introduced himself to us and all the time, he spoke Japanese. Most of us could understand him and those of us who do not understand him, could understand him, nevertheless. Hisami and Shelley helped us with translating some of the Japanese into English. We introduced ourselves to him too and wore stickers with our names on to help him learn our names. We only have one name to remember but he had seven. We learnt how to sit in a number of different ways. Each way has a name e. g. Otosan sits with his legs crossed and his arms crossed; Okasan sits on her knees with her hands resting on her knees; Onisan sits with his legs straight and “taisosuwari” is when we sit with bent knees and hug them. These are different seating positions that we will do every week so we need to try to memorise them.

We walked around the room and when we heard the whistle blow, we had to freeze. We also played a game where Tanaka sensei says “ka, ka, ka……” while we walk around the room and when he said the word “kaminari’ we had to bend our knees, crouch down and cover our belly buttons. In Japanese mythology, it is believed that when lightning strikes, there is an ‘oni’ in the clouds and he will come down and take your belly button away. So we had to crouch down and cover ours, which was a lot of fun. Tanaka sensei looked carefully, while pretending to be the ‘oni’, to see if any of our belly buttons were exposed!

We also played a game with cushions, where we had to put a certain part of our body on the cushion. We put our cheek, our tummy, our forehead, our knees and last we had to stand on the cushion and try to balance.

We concentrated when Tanaka sensei was talking so that we knew what to do. We did a big variety of activities and really loved our first day of gymnastics this year. During the earlier part of the morning, we decorated a face shape using collage materials. The face shapes are made from foam and come in different skin tones. Our teachers let us choose which one we thought best represented ourselves and were surprised to see which ones we wanted. Most of us ended up choosing a skin tone that was a lot darker than our real one. We will use these faces to make a person and add our bodies to them, during the month.

We are so excited that some of our mums have been writing stories about the origin of our names. Those of us who have these stories written about us, drew our faces using lead pencils. They are on display in our classrooms next to the story of our name.

During our morning circle time, we listened to initial sounds of our names and sang a song for each friend. We found our names and placed them onto the magnetic board at the front door. Our story today was called “Too Many Pears”. It was a story about a cow that loved pears and ate anything that had pears in it – pear pie, pears dipped in chocolate, fresh pears, baked pears etc. She eventually ate too many pears and felt a little bit sick. She then turned to eating apples! At the sensory activity table, we had our large sand tray together with small spoons and plastic colourful cups. We drew in the sand, scooped sand into the cups, turned it over and made sand castles and more. We also played with two sensory trays that were filled with a variety of materials. There were marbles, feathers, paper cups, pom poms, artificial petals etc. We also did one of the 49 piece puzzles and successfully completed it. Koh chan wanted to finish it just before lunch time and worked as quickly as he could to do it.

We did a science experiment with milk, food colouring and dish washing liquid. It was supposed to create a bubbling in the liquid but it did not. Our teachers are not sure if the dish washing liquid is different here in Japan.

We look forward to seeing Taiyo tomorrow (Grace was sick today), together with William B and Jonah, who are two of our new friends, starting in our class.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel