Celebrate good times, come on!

It was a huge birthday in our class today because five of our friends who were born in April and May, celebrated together. We were all so excited even though today’s birthday differed from our usual celebrations. The reason why it was an “unusual” birthday was because the birthday parents were on Zoom and not in the classroom. We really love having our friends in the classroom but we think “corona” changed that for now. We have some other things in the classroom that are different and they don’t affect us at all. In fact, our teachers are surprised at how we just embraced the screens on the tables and somehow don’t even notice them. We have them on the tables when we are doing table work and games and when we eat lunch. They are transparent and we can see through them, which is probably why we don’t notice them really.
Okay, back to the birthday party. We were excited to welcome all our parents, friends and teachers. We were glad that we could have such a large group of family members on our Zoom today, to join us as we celebrated our five, five year old friends.
We started off the party singing our “hello” song and saying our names once we saw them on the screen and then we sang to our family members too. We helped them by singing their names and saying “it’s nice to be with you”. Then we looked at our friends and noticed that they didn’t really look like they were having a birthday. They were missing so many important items e. g. a crown, a card, a cake, candles and a present.
Shelley said that she could make real magic and use her wand and make them look like they were having a birthday. So she told our birthday friends to close their eyes, then she said a silly spell and called some of us quietly to put crowns on our friends heads. Now they really looked like they were special and we were so excited because Shelley’s magic worked! She said that she can only do one successful spell per day. We are not sure about this…….hmmmmm!
We sang “Five little candles” and pretended that our fingers were the candles and blew them out, all the time subtracting one candle at a time, until we had zero candles left. Our birthday friends counted to five in Japanese and English and some of us counted to five in other languages. We also said thank you in French, Norwegian, Chinese, Japanese, English, Afrikaans, Tagalog, Spanish and Hebrew.
Then we gave them each a colourful cup with a candle in it. We asked them to wait to blow out the candle until everyone had theirs. We switched the lights off and then we counted ten in Japanese and they blew their candles out. We sang Happy Birthday to you in English, Japanese, Chinese, Norwegian, and Spanish. We love singing songs in our native languages. It was tricky for E because he was on Zoom so we held the candle near to where he was on the screen and helped him blow, which he did. We also held the crown near his head so that it looked like he was wearing a crown. Our friends chose one of us to present them with their gift and card that we made. We all had a turn to show our parents and friends, our birthday gifts. We are excited for them to read all the messages to us when we get home. Some of us think that it would be a good bed time story.
We were very happy to see so many party bags inside our school bags and we also enjoyed listening to the book that J donated to the class, on his 5th birthday. The book is called “Take me out to the Yakyu” which is similar to the song that is sung in America when you go to Baseball. It was a great story and we all
said thank you to J for his gift to the class.
Oh, boy, it was so hot in the park, we came back to school earlier than usual. When we were in the park we played in the green area and our teachers felt that it was too hot with our smocks on. It is like we are wearing two T-shirts. Tomorrow we will use Sports Day sashes and see if this is cooler. We played on Kai’s skateboard in the green area. Some of us stood on it while K pushed us. It was so cool.
When we returned to school, we washed our hands and then We lay down on the floor to cool off and listened to a special children’s meditation story about kindness and love. When someone shows you kindness or love, it makes you feel really good inside, we think. We tried to think about someone who we love and who makes us have that warm, fuzzy feeling inside our bodies. Then we said “I LOVE YOU” to some of our friends and teachers and we noticed how their eyes were smiling. We couldn’t see their mouths because they were wearing masks.
It was another special day in Flowers Class with us singing “I’m a Flowers girl, and I’m a Flowers Boy” and we have another new song called “Diversity” that S composed. We love singing our own unique songs that are very much particular to Ohana International School.
Thanks everyone and happy birthday to our friends.
Love always all the children in Flowers Class.