Happy Birthday Shelley

Today we celebrated Shelley’s birthday in her classroom. We all worked really hard to keep it a secret and have been making a card as well as a paper-clay cake for her over the beginning of this week. We also welcomed William (Ayaka’s fiancé) back this morning and we had a great time with him. Today we needed to prepare some food for snacks as a surprise and so we cut some cucumber, carrots, grapes, tomatoes and red pepper on the main table. We were using metal table knives to cut the fruit and vegetables and so needed to be a little careful. Together we then arranged them to make the words ‘Happy Birthday’ on a tray. It looked wonderful and we were so proud of our handiwork. On the carpet there were some wooden blocks which we all love and we used these to build a high tower. There was also a box of Duplo house blocks and it was great to see Riko building a wonderful house from the pieces. After packing away the toys we set up for our usual snack time but we then went downstairs to surprise Shelley with the gifts we had made for her and celebrate her birthday. We were soon joined by all the children and teachers in buds class. When Shelley arrived she had a hat covering her face and was guided to the chair. When she removed the hat covering her face we all shouted ‘Surprise’. First Tokutaro gave Shelley a golden crown, wished her Happy Birthday and gave her a big hug. Ava then gave Shelley the card made by flowers class and then each of the classes gave their cards too. Vincent gave Shelley some beautiful flowers from the parents. We then presented Shelley with the paper clay cake we had made and lit the candle. We sang ‘Happy Birthday to you’ and Shelley blew out the candle with a big smile on her face. We all then got up and sang together ‘If you’re happy and you know it’. We gave lots of ideas and had a really good time singing and moving to this. We moved back to our own classrooms and had our snack as well as some healthy fruit and vegetables followed by some apple and grape juice, which was very yummy. The park was very warm and William was the center of attention today. We all chased him around the park and were soon very sweaty. In circle time we put out nine leaves which Darren had found in the park. We were very surprised to see that they were all different shapes, sizes and colors. We learnt that some were serrated and some were not, some were even green on one side while purple on the other. We then had some Montessori puzzles and tried to match the leaf shapes with the leaf puzzle pieces. We found that we didn’t have any serrated puzzle leaves but that was okay. We all gave our ideas about what the shapes looked like, some like hearts, some like rockets, some like grass etc. Have a great weekend.