Happy Birthday Gento

Welcome back after a week away from school, recharging our batteries for the last term of the school year. We were so happy to see our friends and teachers and also have a birthday to celebrate on our first day back at school. Yesterday Gento turned two years old so his mum, dad and his big brother Yuta came along to celebrate with us all. We think that they had more fun than Gento as he didn’t really like all the attention that we were giving him. He did like his special birthday candles in the shape of the letters GENTO; he also liked the cupcakes and the strawberries. We sang ‘When you’re happy and you know it’ but when we shouted “happy birthday” he didn’t really like the noise. so we whispered “happy birthday” and this was a lot better. We also sang “Gento is 2 years old today”; “Two little candles”; “Happy birthday to you”; “Otanjobi Omedetou”; “We all clap hands together” and “How old are you now”. We counted two which is easy for all of us and we also counted how many children there were in our school today. There were twelve children and of the twelve, there were eight boys and four girls. If we added our teachers to the girls, we would have landed up with more girls than boys. After Oliver presented Gento with his gift of hearts, we all went to the snack table to feast. We want to say a big thank you to Gento’s family for the beautiful birthday party they prepared for us today. Upstairs during the morning, we all held hands and made a circle and Miya said that it reminded her of an egg; “like a big egg, like a penguin egg”. Jamie said that when we made a small circle, it was “like a caterpillar”. Our wall picture has eggs on it but these eggs are all small. We thought that it would be good to make caterpillars and put them on the picture with the eggs. At the activity table we had a large selection of materials e.g. pipe cleaners, tissue paper, tape, thick plastic sheets, corn starch packing etc. We made caterpillars using all of the materials including tape, markers and scissors. When they are completed, we will add them to the large picture with the eggs.

In our morning circle, we dramatized planting seeds with our bodies. We first squatted down and dug a hole in the soil; we then sprinkled the seeds inside the soil and covered them up. We put our hands above our heads and made them into the shape of a circle like the sun; we made our fingers dance like the rain as if it was sprinkling down onto the ground and the last thing that we did was pretend that we were flowers growing and we jumped up as high as we could reach.

You can see from the photos how well we are taking care of our flowers growing in the garden. They have grown so much thanks to the rain that we had during our spring break.

Downstairs we welcome Clodia back to school and today was her first long day at school. She stayed all day until almost two o’clock. Tomorrow we welcome Isabelle to Ohana and can’t wait to see her again since meeting her about a month ago.

Love Shelley, Darren, Goh, Marie, Sabine and Kana