Bye Bye Ava, Lilian & Christine

Dear Flower Class parents, Thank you for a wonderful semester. We all had a wonderful morning filled with laughter and a few sad faces and tears as we say goodbye to Christine, Bill, Ava and Lilian. We started the morning free play time with many of us enjoying the ball track activity on the carpet. It was fun to see how high we could build the tracks using the Velcro wall for support. On the table we had lots of art materials including stickers, sparkly pens, colored paper and shiny origami paper. We also had some black paper which we used to make our own freestyle art cards. On the table Marc and Nanako played ‘Snakes and Ladders’ and it was a lot of fun to watch mark counting off the numbers. We packed away all the toys and art materials very quickly and soon started our snack. Today we sang our snack song twice with all the girls singing first and the boys second. We all use our beautiful singing voices and really enjoyed this. After our yummy snacks we all read a book together called ‘Hugs and Kisses’. This was a good book about how a little girl shares her love by kissing her cat. The cat then goes and kisses a cow, which in turn kisses further animals until the story comes all the way back to the little girl. We all lined up and moved to petals class next to start the celebration for Christine, Ava and Lilian. We all sat on the carpet with our friends and siblings form petals class and read a book titled ‘Special Me’. This was a great book all about how we are all different and special. Christine, Ava and Lilian all then took center stage to receive their cards and big class portfolios of their best and favorite artwork. Many of us wanted to say a few words saying how much we will miss them and of course we then had lots of hugs to give all three of them. We lined up and gave some big warm hugs and said our goodbyes. A few tears were shed and we really had to try and control our emotions. When we came back to the classroom we had a special popcorn snack with our friends in a big circle on the carpet. We only had a few minutes left and being a special and magical time of year we did some magic with Darren. He had 2 playing cards which were the same. We gave one of the cards a magic kiss each and then put a colored stick on top of the second card. When we waved the card and said the magic words “Abracadabra” the stick magically levitated off of the card. Wow! The second piece of magic we have seen before and involves two pink cups that fit over each other. When we placed a 1 yen coin on top of the second cup and covered it the coin disappeared. It magically appeared in Ava’s hairband. We were very surprised. To finish our morning we sang a goodbye song together. Please have a great winter break and a happy New Year to you all. Please stay warm and we look forward to seeing you all next semester.