Exercises on Mondays

It is summer once again without the humidity which made today a really beautiful day outside. We had fun in the park and enjoyed playing with our friends in Bud class who were outside at the same time as we were. Today is the day when we have seven friends in class and we love returning to school after the weekend, knowing that we have a small group of friends to play with; as we settle in for a new week together.

During the morning we made backgrounds for future Autumn/Fall art works. We painted with red, orange, and brown paint and used different tools to paint with and make patterns. We used a toilet roll to make circular shapes, we had a paintbrush, a toothbrush, yoghurt cups to make squarish shapes, a sponge and we added some yellow paper to it. We did not have any yellow paint so tried to use yellow food colouring but it was too pale; and we painted over it. We attached the yellow paper to the paint and it adhered to it just like glue. We will make a few more tomorrow and then cut them in half so that we each have a background.

Our weaving is never ending and we only managed to do one row and we have one more to go. We have so much to do in our classroom that we get side tracked or something else holds our interest for longer than expected. You can see some of us painting on our backgrounds using Autumn/Fall colours. At the second activity table we had Plasticine which is something that we are not so familiar with. It is used in a similar way to play dough. We used cutters and rollers and enjoyed the unusual texture. It feels completely different when you touch it and in a way, is a little stickier.

Michaela brought a wonderful game for us to play with and it really worked out well in a small group. Do you remember our “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see” book? Well it is a game that was created from the book. You open up a board and put cards in the centre of it. Then four people take a card which is either a Panda Bear or a Brown Bear. We each turned over a card from the centre and tried to see if it matched with the animal pictures in front of us, on the board. We loved playing it and were unable to finish it, so Michaela said that we can keep it and play it again tomorrow.

We love moving the furniture in our class and always help our teachers. We even move things that we do not need to and our teacher’s just smile and let us. Every time Tanaka sensei comes to school, he comes to say hello before our lesson. He looks at what we are making and asks us questions. We look forward to our classes with him because we do so many fun exercises. We repeat many of the activities however each time, he introduces a new game for us to play. Today we used our circular cushions to walk on and then we went into animal character. Then we played another game where we had to walk around the cushions and when he blew his whistle we had to quickly sit on a cushion. The trick here was that there was one cushion short so one of us didn’t have a cushion. Whoever didn’t have a cushion had to ask someone “do ite kudasai” which means “please can you move” and then they stood up and had to go and ask someone else to move etc. We did this until all of us had had a turn to ask someone to move in Japanese.

Hisami read us the story of “Momotaro”. It was written in Japanese and English so she read both languages to us. She said that the English translation was a little difficult for us to understand so she used her own words to explain what the story was about. When we were walking to the park, we told our teachers that we had not yet sung our good morning song; so we sang to one another as we walked down the lane. We also sang “Incy wincy spider”; “I like yellow…..what is yellow” and “If I lived over in Paris, France”.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.