Happy Birthday Hisami

This morning on the carpet we saw a familiar game that we haven’t played in a while based on ‘Go fish’. For this game all the cards are put face down on the carpet and then we need to turn over two cards. If they match we get to keep them, if not then we turn them back over for our friends to try. Whoever has the most cards at the end is the winner. On the main table Ava enjoyed using the spinning tops and even managed to get all of them spinning at the same time. We needed to pack away the toys a little early today as we were heading to petals class to celebrate Hisami’s birthday with a big party. We went downstairs and saw that buds and petals classes were already there and we soon got to sit down together. We started off by singing a few songs including “If you’re happy and you know it” and we gave our own suggestions for actions too. When we discussed what happens at a party we realized that Hisami needed a crown. Kosei looked around the room and soon spotted the golden crown. Jeremy also spotted the card we had all worked so hard on and gave her it with a big hug saying ‘Happy Birthday”. We then counted to see how old Hisami is today and discovered that she is 19. We had some good guesses as to her age, ranging from 1 to 100. We all snag Happy Birthday and Hisami puffed out all the candles on a cake. We returned to the classroom for snack but before eating together we read a book titled ‘The biggest Christmas Tree ever’ which we all loved. Ayaka after snack got many of us together to read one of our favorite books ‘Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see”? Soon it was time for Nile’s ‘Show & Tell’. Nile brought along her Japanese book of ‘Frozen’ which she then read the whole first page of unaided. Well done Nile! She also showed us her dolls from the frozen movie as well as beautiful sleigh which she had made from recycled materials. She answered many questions from her friends and used a little bit of both English as well as Japanese. Good job, Nile and thank you for your effort. Soon it was time to move around a little and so we decided to play some games. Our first game was musical chairs which we love. We were all very careful not to push and in the end Nile was the winner. She then chose a friend to partner with and both Nile and Kosei came into the middle of the carpet with a balloon. The game was to see how many times they could hit the balloon back and forth to each other without it touching the floor. They did really well and soon we all tried this. It was a bit harder than we expected and so we then tried a balloon each and tried to hit it into the air with one hand. This was a little easier and we did really well. Using the mirrors we then rubbed the balloon on our heads to see how our hair would stand up like it was magnetized. Darren said it was called ‘static electricity’ making it do this. We looked carefully and had a good laugh at how our hair moved with the balloon. At the table we reviewed the shapes that we knew including circle, square, triangle, heart, spiral, star, oval and then a few new ones such as arrow, pentagon, hexagon, and octagon. Some of the shapes we didn’t know the names for but they looked like familiar shapes such as a teardrop or raindrop. Thinking about the shapes and which colours we might associate each of them with we went to the art table and chose colors we wanted to use, for example the teardrop we colored blue, the circle red like and apple or tomato etc. Tomorrow is our last day for the semester and we look forward to seeing you then. Have a great afternoon.