Happy Birthday Emily

Today we celebrated Emily’s fourth birthday with her mum, dad and brother. They brought one of her favourite books to read which is called “A squash and a squeeze”. We sang “Happy Birthday to you” and “When you’re happy and you know it”. We presented her with her envelope filled with birthday hearts and wishes. Now that we are older we can think of special things that we want to say to our friends when it is their birthday. We were spoilt at snack time with a wonderful spread of cupcakes, grapes, strawberries and cheese sticks. We want to say a big thank you to Emily and her family for their generosity and for joining us for this special celebration. We think that Emily loved having her family with her to celebrate at school.

When we arrived at school this morning we saw that there were still some decorations for us to put on our hagoita. This was the final day of decorating them. We had a selection of shapes that we made last week using the hole punches and then there were precious rhinestones.

Miya and Emily helped put the finishing touches to Ayaka’s crown as it is her birthday tomorrow….shhhhhhhh! They drew flowers and a treasure chest on it. Marie and Andres completed their hearts for her wishes and now we are all set for tomorrow’s big day. Ayaka is going to be “30” and our teachers think that is she is still very young! We think that if someone is bigger than the number ten, they must be really old. Our teachers always say that we will think differently when we get older.

In the library we read “We’re going on a bear hunt” and once again we filled in the missing words as our teachers read to us. In our sounds and literacy lesson, our teachers drew letters on the white board and we had to guess what sounds the letters made. We sang the songs and did the actions to all of the following letters “s, a, t, i, p and n”. During our circle time we used plastic colourful counters to do simple addition.

Downstairs, we played with the weighing scale again and tried to see what was heavy and what was light. We are extremely busy each day engaged in dramatic play using the entire classroom for this. We put the chairs together and pretended that we were on a bus. We had our soft toys with us, handbags, scarves and other things that we thought were important. We sometimes find ourselves in conflict situations and our teachers are standing back and letting us find our way with our friends. They sometimes here us using big loud voices and they encourage us to use our indoor voices and words with our friends. We all are really kind to one another even though sometimes we take things from our friends that they are playing with and they get angry with us.

We love this story about the moon and today after our teachers read it to us, we made faces that looked just like the front and back covers. On the front cover, the moon is smiling because it is night time and we can see the moon up in the sky. In the day time, the moon is asleep so we closed our eyes and made our faces look like a sleeping moon. The moon is a circle shape when it is full and we tried to make our faces look really round like the moon when it is full

We danced and sang to our new favourite tape that starts off with “Peanut butter jelly”. We tried to do the actions and sing the words at the same time. We played with the beautiful piece of Japanese fabric and hid underneath it. Our teachers like to play a game with it where one of us hides and someone says their name and they have to try to guess whose voice they can hear. It is not so easy for us to keep secrets and one of us usually shouts our friend’s name out so we know who it is even before we have a chance to guess.

Santiago, William and Allie did their pictures using coloured pencils and stickers.

Tomorrow is a big day for someone special!

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