Happy Birthday Emily
Happy Birthday Emily! We had a lovely party with Emily, her mum Mie and her baby brother William. We 
looked at Emily and saw that she looked just like all of us so what were we going to find for her, that would make her look like a birthday queen? Jamie’s eyes spotted the crown and he found it and placed it on her head. She was so happy and looked just like a queen. We all were together on the third floor to celebrate and we started off by standing in a circle, holding hands and singing ‘When you’re happy and you know it’. We clapped our hands, stamped our feet, blinked our eyes, shouted happy birthday and then whispered happy birthday. We then thought about what happens when we have a birthday. Noah said we get cake and Jamie said we get presents. We made a beautiful present for Emily using heart shapes and ribbon. Each of us decorated a heart and when it was laminated, Kana attached each heart to a pink ribbon. Emily and her mum held the ribbon and saw that it 
was so long. Maybe she can hang it in her room to remind her of her third birthday party at Ohana. We sang “Emily is three years old today”; “Happy birthday to you”; “Otanjobi Omedetou” and “Three little candles”. When we sang “Three little candles”, we held up three fingers and after each rhyming verse, we blew a ‘candle’ out and we had one finger less as our fingers represented the candles. We love this song and can manage holding up three fingers easily. When we sing our “Where is Thumbkin” song or “Tommy Thumb”, we find it really hard to hold up our ‘Tommy Tall’ finger and our ‘Ruby Ring’ finger. We want to thank Mie, Emily’s mum for bringing us such a beautiful cake to eat and some small “traffic lights”. Emily’s mum used tomatoes for the red light, peppers for the yellow light and zucchini for the green light. They were so delicious and creative.
During the morning upstairs we did some activities that our friends had missed out on doing last week and we added to some “works in progress”. We added gold decorations to our calligraphy paintings and some of us made our dragon pictures representing the Year of the Dragon. We played a game called “One Balloon Touch. We each had a partner and had to touch the balloon only once and see how long it stayed in the air. Oliver paired with Nico; Noah paired with Jamie and Darren paired with Beckett. Our story today was called ‘The Enormous Crocodile’ by Roald Dahl. It is a long time favourite and is one of Shelley’s books that she collected when she first started teaching in preschool.
Downstairs we made drawings using white crayons on black paper. Miya and Emily drew a person on their 
pages. We all pasted on small shapes that we had made when we used the hand punches. Some of us also pasted the negative shapes on our page too. We have some work in our folders which our teachers will send home with us at the end of the week. Most of our work goes into our portfolios but some other work we put into our folders. We read “A colour of his own” which is about a chameleon who felt sad because he thought that he never had a colour of his own; because chameleons change colour wherever they are. Sometimes we wish that we could change colour and hide too.
The photo on the left is of us getting ready to go outside to play in the park. It was quite a long process with us having to take off shoes, get jackets and then squeeze us into our Tshirts. We have fun when we put our Tshirts on as our teachers tell us that we are marshmallows or mash potato people or mashed bananas and we laugh.
Love Shelley, Darren, Kana, Marie and Goh