Happy birthday Darren, Maryna and Sayaka

The rain welcomed us this morning and it only lasted until after snack time so we could still go outside, have a walk in the neighbourhood and enjoy being outdoors. It has become really humid lately and when we are outside many of us sweat, as it is so “mushi” (mushi atsui in Japanese means humid). Today there was a big surprise for our teachers who were born in May. We all gathered together in Buds Class and celebrated with them. We are not sure if

it was a surprise for them, but it was a surprise for us…..haha. Darren and Maryna already celebrated their birthdays early in the month and Sayaka’s is still coming. You know how we look up to our teachers and believe everything that they tell us. Well, today, we learnt something different. Shelley said that sometimes teachers pretend and when it comes to their age, they

are the biggest pretenders. Sayaka told us that she was 25; Darren said that he was 20 and Maryna was 18. It sounded a little suspicious to us. Shelley is always honest about her age so we know that when she says she is 58, she really is 58! There were a lot of us sitting together on the carpet in Buds Class, so it was not easy to stand and sing “When you’re happy and you know it”. So we sat and sang it and had to think of actions to do, while sitting down.

We thought of clapping our hands, stamping our feet, and nodding our heads.

We sang “Happy birthday” while John played the guitar and, since we arrived early, we joined in with Buds Class music time and some more songs with the guitar. John does beautiful music with the children in his class and we felt so lucky to be a part of one of his lessons. We sang a “Butterfly” song with him which he composed. In fact, most of his songs are his compositions made especially for

the children in his class. On the cake, were three candles and we couldn’t understand why there were so few. Michaela said that there should be a lot more, because the teachers are much bigger than three years old. She is right. The reason why there were three candles was because there were three teachers; there was one candle for each teacher. We heard them talking about what colour they would out. They blew the candles out and we gave them their birthday cards

from all the children in the school. Each class made three cards.

Then the birthday people, chose what cake they wanted for themselves…….

Happy birthday Maryna, Darren and Sayaka chan.

Because it was a rainy day, our teachers planned a lot of activities for us to do. We started off baking with

Hisami. We followed the recipe carefully; softening the butter, mixing the dry ingredients together and then adding an egg. We created dough and put it inside plastic wrap and rolled it flat with rolling pins. Then we used cookie cutters and cut out hearts, circles and other shaped cookies. We baked them in the oven and our classroom smelled just like a bakery. We were excited as our teachers said that we could have some

cookies at snack time.

At the large table, our huge group art work lay and we did some marbling on it. This was a different kind of marbling. Two of us worked with Shelley at a time. We each chose a colour of paint and she scooped some out with a plastic spoon, and there was a marble inside. It was a kind of game that we played. We pushed the marble all over the painting and used the spoon to catch it so it didn’t fall off onto the floor. It was a great activity for the fun element and it also showed our teachers how well our eye hand co-ordination is. Shelley was standing and running around the table catching her marble. It was like mini lacrosse! The result on our art work is really beautiful. You can

see from the photos. We hung the large painting out to dry when the rain stopped and then we prepared for the next part of our art work.

We have special punches that you slide paper inside; then you squeeze them and a shape falls onto the table. The shapes that we made were teddy bears, Christmas trees, stars, hearts, snowflakes and suns. While we were doing this, our friends at the other end of the table, cut out small pieces from the negative shapes. We spent a lot of time doing these activities and really concentrated on what we were doing. Some of our friends drew on the white boards so we were all busy ‘working’ at this

time. Early on during free play time, we had a drawing activity with stencils, pencils, our name cards and sparkly pens. These pictures are in our school bags for us to take home. Tomorrow we will use the shapes both negative and positive and paste them onto our art

work.

Thanks for a busy fun day in Petals Class and we hope that our teachers have a great year ahead, enjoying being teachers, learning, having fun and being happy and healthy.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel