Throughout the school year, as well as our 4 set Units of Inquiry, we try to conduct mini investigations following the children’s interests and exploring questions that come up during their learning and playing.
As you may have heard at home, over the past couple of weeks, the Superstars have been fascinated by gymnastics – rhythmic gymnastics in particular.
The interest started a couple of weeks ago after a conversation about it not really being safe to do somersaults in the classroom.
From here we talked about where it would be safe to do somersaults. The students decided the safest place to do somersaults would be in the gymnastics room.
The Superstars were then talking about how looooooooooooooonnnngggg they had to wait till they would have gymnastics till PE again.
They wanted to do gymnastics in the classroom – but again (Ms. Jacky being such a spoilsport….!!!) we decided there wasn’t the correct equipment or enough room to safely do gymnastics in our classroom.
The question was posed ….. “What can we safely do in the classroom?”
The idea of rhythmic gymnastics was introduced – we watched some videos on you tube of the different kinds of equipment used in rhythmic gymnastics ….. ribbons (being one of our favorite things to create with) was a clear favorite.
Excitement was high …. many students went off to try and create their own ribbon on a stick. Different sticks were used till it was decided that Lincoln logs made the best handle. Much dancing ensued.
The students then organised the mat area like a gymnastics ring with chairs for the audience. Dancing music was requested from the DJ. Turns were organised and then the show was on!!!

We went to the library and found some books on gymnastics which were read and studied with much discussion!

We then set up a time to go and visit Coach Ramon in the gymnastics room. He talked about and showed us the different types of equipment that is used in Rhythmic Gymnastics.
He also showed us the apparatus that regular gymnasts use. We learned that men and women do some events the same, but there are also some things that only men do, and some things that only women do.
We were then able to explore and play with the different rhythmic gymnastics equipment.
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(Click HERE to see the photos on flickr)
When we came back to the classroom, we made a graph of our favorite kind of rhythmic gymnastics equipment.It was very hard to choose only one!! But in the end the ribbons were the clear winner!

Finally, we wrote things we learned, liked or knew about gymnastics in our journals.
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We can’t wait to go to the gymnastics room and explore the rhythmic gymnastics equipment again!!