Never Give Up!

Welcome back. We hope you all had a great weekend and enjoyed the Autumn weather. The blocks on the carpet were very popular this morning. We managed to use all of the ‘Kapla’ blocks and even had to get another box of blocks to help us build more. We made a big structure and even put a sloping triangular roof on it too. On the activity table we made something with the paper art clay but it is a bit of a secret. All we can tell you is it is for Shelley’s class birthday party which we are celebrating on Friday this week in the classroom with the children. Eito wanted to make something with the junk art materials and used lots of bottle caps and tape centers. After snack time we headed straight for the park. It was beautiful weather in the park today and we took along some chalk for drawing on the ground. We had green, white, pink, blue, orange or yellow to choose from. Our favorite activity was going down the concrete section of the slide and holding the chalk to make long lines. Jessica did a great job drawing her mummy and daddy while Jeremy drew his favorite thing, a green car. We needed to leave the park quite quickly today so that we could get back in time for our Japanese fitness class with Tanaka Sensei. We started off as we usually do with our greetings in Japanese and then found a space. We stretched and warmed up by jumping, squatting and knee bending while counting along from 1 to 8 in Japanese with Tanaka Sensei. We continued our stretching exercises by putting our hands above our heads and legs apart while stretching from side to side too. We then all tried our ‘bridge’ pose again and we found we are getting so much better at it. We then tried some one legged balancing poses before putting out the cushions like stepping stones. We each stepped on a stone carefully and then returned to our line with bunny hops, and frog jumps. It was great fun. We then played a great game where we sat on a cushion each and then one person had to go to one of their friends and say ‘Move Please’. Their friend would then stand up and move to another friend and repeat the process until everyone had moved seats at least once. We then all continued by moving places together. Our last game was to match up all the boys and girls together while moving around. Our circle time was quite short this morning and so we had a few minutes to sing and dance along to our favorite song at the moment ‘Never Give Up’. We like to march and jump to this but when we went through the words in the book we found 2 lines that we thought we could add some actions to. The first new line was “Things may get in your way” and Toku said it would be a good idea to stop and raise your hands a little like something was in your way. The next new line was “There may be a big delay” which Jennifer figured out was to do with time and so we all pointed to imaginary watches on our wrists. We then played the music and marched, jumped, stopped and pointed together. It was great fun and we had a very good day today. Have a great afternoon. All our love, Darren, Ayaka & Nanako