Happy birthday Taiyo

It feels like we haven’t been to the park for such a long time but today we were lucky enough to play in the sunshine and move our bodies in the ways that we so love to. We ran, we went down the slide, we climbed, we played tag, we played hide and seek, we played in the sandbox, and we played with nature and laughed……. We just love the feeling when we do what is natural for children to do! Play and have fun and learn at the same time. You can see in this scene that our play is evolving into something interesting. Well, we will explain to you what happened here. Luka initiated the play by setting up a picnic area on the carpet together with some Lego. He said: “It’s a zoo”. He used the crane to take the orange dinosaur out of the Lego box and then Michaela and Miyu joined in. Miyu put people into a car and she said: “These people are working in the zoo”. Michaela brought a bag of food to feed the animals and said: “The animals are hungry and need to eat ice cream and pepper”.

Luka took a pizza and cut it so that he could also feed them.

Miyu: “The horses eat carrots”.

Luka: “The horses eat grass”.

Vincent: The giraffe eats broccoli”.

Alexis: “The animals eat egg and tomatoes”.

This imaginative play went on for a long time and then Miyu said: “The zookeeper and animals are all tired. They need to sleep”. With that, Vincent, Michaela, Alexis, Miyu and Luka put all the food into bags and arranged the cushions in a row like a train. They sat down together with their bags and Vincent said: “We are going to Tohoku”. Our teachers were really happy that we spoke about Tohoku and understood that there are many people there who still are without the things that we take for granted, in our lives.

We celebrated Taiyo’s birthday today together with his dad Mikey. Mikey walked into the room while we were playing a good morning game, so our teachers encouraged him to stay in the background so that he could observe Taiyo in the class. Our parents never get a chance to see us in the classroom and observe us naturally as members of the class. Usually when our parents come to school, we want to sit with them and we forget about everything that we learnt in the class. Our teachers say that this is completely natural and they don’t mind. Taiyo joined in with our games that we were playing and the words that we were singing in different languages. We all did many actions and then eventually we went to the large carpet to prepare singing some more songs and start the actual birthday party.

We started off by singing “Let’s all hold hands in a circle” and we added in actions like jumping, turning around, skipping, shouting ‘happy birthday’, whispering ‘happy birthday’ and clapping our hands. Then Lilian gave Taiyo his crown, but he didn’t want to wear it so his dad wore it.

We lit four candles and sang “Taiyo is four years old today” and “Four little candles shining merrily”. His dad helped blow the candles out and we sang “Happy birthday to you” in English and Japanese. We all went and sat down for snack which was fruit on skewers and vegetables on skewers. It was so delicious; we ended up eating everything. Shelley said that we didn’t need to eat “like a shinkansen” which means that we ate really quickly.

At the activity tables, Nina, Luka, Lilian and Michaela completed their festive season pictures. They had everything in green, red, gold and silver and our teachers will put them into the workbooks/portfolios when they are dry. Lucinda drew her friend’s names in the office area by copying them from their flashcards. Luka sat with her and drew too and Miyu and Lilian did puzzles at the other two tables. We used the corkboards again and love making designs with the shapes and hammering the nails.

Thanks for another great week at Ohana and we are looking forward to seeing you for the last week of this year, 2014. We are looking forward to seeing our friends at Taiyo’s party this weekend. Have a great weekend everyone!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel