Happy 23rd Birthday Christine and Adams 'Show & Tell'

Welcome back everybody. We hope you all had a great long weekend and enjoyed the party on Friday. We started the morning in Flowers Class by working on the peg boards with elastic bands. We haven’t used these in a while and used lots of elastic bands on them. For those of you who don’t know what ‘peg boards’ are, they are large boards with lots of nail heads in them which are sticking out. We can then place elastic bands over the tops of the nail heads to make patterns etc. They have a circular ring of nails in the middle which can look like bicycle spokes on a wheel. This is going to be our theme for this month: transport. On the second table Ava helped complete a birthday art clay cake for her mother’s birthday. The cake needed some words on the base and so we used stickers which Ava applied and then added some drawn pictures too. On the carpet area Kosei, Adam and Eito used the roller ball tracks which can be attached to the Velcro wall. These are great fun and together we made quite a few tracks and together tried the small balls to see if they would follow the track successfully. We also had lots of ‘junk art’ materials out which Nile used to make a wonderful model of Elsa from the movie. She enjoyed using the colored markers and the tape to put it all together. Well done Nile, your model looks fantastic. We also noticed how the pumpkin seeds we planted last week have all sprouted and started to grow. Wow!! After packing away the toys we were joined by buds and petals class so that we could celebrate Christine’s birthday (Ava & Lilian’s mother). We all sat together and then invited her down and shouted ‘Surprise’. I don’t think she suspected a thing until she got into the classroom. Christine’s birthday is later in November but we have a very busy month and thought it best to surprise her with an early party. We all sang some songs such as “If you’re happy and you know it” and of course “Happy Birthday” as well as “How old are you now”? Together we counted to see how old Christine is and she told us to stop at 23. We are not sure if this is right anyway, she looks 23 according to Tokutaro!! Of course we had candles, 2 cakes and 3 presents to give her for her birthday. After snack time we headed for the park and it was really warm outside. We decided to play ‘What’s the time Mr. Wolf’ which is always fun as we get to run lots and lots with this game. After coming back to the classroom we sang ‘The wheels on the bus’ song and then started Adam’s ‘Show and Tell’. Adam had brought along a big magnifying glass and lots of beautiful polished stones which he said he got from the mountains a long time ago. He loved showing us his favorite stone which was purple and clear and then answered lots of questions from his friends. He looked very proud as he showed his friends the stones up close. Well done and thank you Adam. We introduced the new theme by asking them to look at the new books in the library and around the classroom, to think of the songs we had sung and we were soon all talking about different ways of getting from one place to another. We came up with bicycle, tricycle, car, taxi, train, truck, airplane, helicopter, horse, elephant, boat and even camel. We then read a great book titled ‘Duck on a bike’ which was really funny and had lots of animals in it. Have a great afternoon. All our love, Darren and Ayaka