September birthdays

Today we did not have gymnastics because it is a National Holiday in Japan and most people are off from work. However, we decided that instead of it being Miyashita Monday, we called it Marvellous Monday. We had a big celebration for our September friends who are having or already had, their birthdays this month. Our last celebration was also in September however it was for our August birthdays. Our September friends celebrated their birthdays today. Happy birthday September friends. We hope you enjoyed your party today and that you can remember all the different languages that we sang Happy Birthday in. We sang in English, Japanese, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Tagalog, Chinese, Bulgarian and Xhosa.

We had a long birthday celebration because it started at drop off time, in the morning. We started off with a very short free play time. We used Kapla blocks and did puzzles. We packed them away after about 30 minutes because we needed to get ready for the party.

The party had many sides to it; it had games, a story, painting and an actual celebration. The first game was Musical Chairs and the chairs were set up in a circle. It started off with there being enough chairs for all of us. One of the mums played music for us and we had to move around the chairs until the music stopped. When the music stopped, we had to find a chair and sit on it as quickly as possible. Phew! You can imagine how stressful it was for some of us! Each time one chair was taken away, so each time, there was one chair less and someone went without a chair. The fun part of the game was that if you couldn't find a chair, you went to the painting tables, put on a smock and started painting on one of three canvasses. The canvasses will land up being a gift for each of our birthday friends who were born in September. So one for each of our friends. We all enjoyed using paints with brushes and other utensils for making patterns, with the paint. What fun. We especially enjoyed shmooshing the paint together, which meant that each canvas ended up with similar colours on them. At the very end one of the mums put some blobs of different coloured paints on the canvas ses and gave us some forks to make patterns. She will make something else on it and then we will present it to them.

After painting, one of the mums read us a story called “The Selfish Crocodile” and then we got ready for snack time. Our snack was abundant with our very own regular snacks plus cupcakes, muffins, apples, grapes, mikan, carrots, cucumbers, tomato,  and osembe. You can imagine how full we were after eating our snack however , our teachers were amazed that we still had space for our lunches. Today we were so happy to eat lunch because all of us brought lunch from home. There was not catered lunch because the obento place was closed for a holiday. Thanks to all our families for making delicious lunch for us, today.

We went to the park and couldn’t believe that it was so hot, just like a summers day. We thought that summer was over, but today, summer came back.  We enjoyed moving our bodies and using up our energy especially since Miyashita sensei was not here today.

Today we did not have a rest time, because we were doing a full evacuation drill. We were practicing in case there is an earthquake or fire and we need to leave Ohana to be safe. Our safe space is Nanzan Elementary School where we have our Sports Day. So we decided to have a late lunch, do some quiet activities like puzzles together and then get ready to go to Nanzan. We all put our backpacks on our backs, changed into outdoor shoes, and walked with a partner in a line to Nanzan. Those of us who had after school classes, went back to school with our teachers and the rest of us went home with our families.

What a full fun day and we want to say a huge thank you to the parents for coming to the party, bringing along delicious food for us to eat and preparing special games and activities for us to do. Thank you! And happy birthday all our September birthday friends.

XOXOXO

Flowers Class Children