Happy birthday Lily

Happy birthday Lily! Today is Lily’s second birthday and when we asked her how old she was, she told us that she was three. We had a lovely party for her downstairs and her mum brought so many lovely treats for us. We started off by standing in a circle holding hands and singing, ‘Everybody stamp your feet x 3 and say good morning to your friends’. We sang good morning in English, Japanese, Norwegian, French and Chinese. We clapped our hands, stamped our feet, blinked our eyes, swayed and shrugged our shoulders for this song. Then we sang “When you’re happy and you know it” and this time we nodded our heads, shouted “happy birthday” and whispered “happy birthday”. We also sang “Lily is two years old today”. Lily was so happy to have her mum with her and they sat next to one another during the party. Eva put Lily’s crown on her head and Tokutaro presented her with our gift which was a string of birthday hearts.

 We went to the snack table and lit two candles for Lily to blow out as well as one that was in the shape of number 2. We sang “happy birthday to you” in English and Japanese and at the end we shouted “hooray”. We sang our snack time song too and then feasted on banana cupcakes, pretzels, caramel corn, watermelon, rockmelon or cantaloupe, grapes and pineapple. Our mums will see that some of us didn’t eat all of our snack because we were so full from the party snack. We also didn’t each much lunch today either. We want to say a big thank you to Abby, Lily’s mum and Lily for the fabulous party treats and fun that we had today. Abby told us that Lily was a tiny baby when she was born. She only weighed two kilograms which is really small.

During the morning we finished making our medals for Sports Day and we drew on paper; threaded beads and played with our friends on the mat. We read the story called “Baby Animals”. In the book it has many activities for us to do while listening to the story. We had to try to match the colour of an animal with a square colour; we had to match the mummies with their babies and many other things. We learnt that a baby dog is a puppy; a baby cat is a kitten; a baby pig is  a piglet and a baby goose is a gosling. We learnt that some animals can be pets and live with us in our homes; some animals live on farms; some animals live in the jungle and some are in a zoo.

Upstairs, we worked together really well as a team today. We started making our medals for Sports day. We chose a play dough cutter in a circle, square, triangle, star or serrated circle shape. We used this shape to make the basic shape from paper clay. We drew onto the surface of the paper clay with a toothpick and added small clay pieces to our creations. Some of us pressed stamps into the clay to make an imprint. The most important thing that we had to remember was to make a hole in the top of the shape so that we can thread a ribbon through it to hang around our necks.

 During circle time we read the book “Hands are not for hitting” and “The Foot Book”. This led us into a discussion about left and right and so we played twister. We had to be able to differentiate our left from our right. We were divided into two groups with half of us playing Twister and the other half were working on their remote controls at the table. We added buttons and a sparkly pipe cleaner which is the antenna. We sang “You are my sunshine” and then played “Chinese Whispers”. We all sat next to one another in a circle and the first person chose just one word to pass around the circle. The word was snack and it travelled all around the circle and came back correctly. Next time we will introduce a phrase and then maybe even a sentence. Sometimes we overlap one another when we go to the park and sometimes we have different outside times but today we were all outside together which was great. Many of us were running around chasing one another; some of us were in the sandbox; some were trying to balance on the elephant feet and some of us were pretending to be dinosaurs. We had a great time.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh and Christine.