There are lots of children moving from the lower school to the upper school this April, and we have some new friends who have joined us as new upper school students too. So we had a one day orientation to get to know each other. We had lots of fun and we learned a lot too. Some highlights...

We started with some team building games. Can we all get on the blue tarp as it gets smaller and smaller? Spot the crazy teacher cheerleading the tower building!

 

We had a "make your own sandwich" lunch party. Yum!


We played hide and seek indoors as it was raining too hard to go to the park.

 

Of course, we studied and played word/phonics games.

And we did craft too. Look at our new school window. Read all about us!

 

Well, Family Fun Day was seriously fun! It was super hot, hot, hot, and we had Suma Rikkyu Park almost to ourselves (nobody else was mad enough!). We started in the Botanical Garden and did color hunting and parachuting before lunch. After lunch we had a treasure hunt/survival course as we hiked across the park and we did the Pirate Adventure Trail. We found our treasure - water guns, water balloons, bubbles, snacks and play dough - and chased each other around getting very wet. Just a few photos... if you have any more, pls send them to me so I can put up a special (parents  only) page. KOBILS staff were too busy having fun to take many! Big thanks to Haruki's Dad for taking this great one!

 

   

Did you know courteous is a synonym of polite? Today I was so impressed with the afterschool 3rd/4th grade class! I gave them some synonym/antonym dominoes and they worked hard to put them together. When they got stuck, they decided to find the dictionaries and the thesaurus and really got stuck into solving the puzzle with no help or prompting from me. And they did it all 100% correctly. It was so difficult too!

 

Here's a vocab game that big boys and little boys enjoy (and girls too actually!). Fly swat karuta is a good way to repeatedly hear new vocabulary and raises the energy level in a class if students are getting sleepy! Because they all hit the cards every time and the cards stay down, there are no obvious winners and losers and there's lots of repetition. The students can take the teacher's calling job too and, of course, the students have to shout the words as they hit them too!