Happy birthday Ayaka

Happy birthday dear Ayaka

Happy birthday to you!

We had such a fun time celebrating with the entire school upstairs today. Just before snack time, our friends from downstairs came to our classroom with their trolley and two platters of brownies. This was because we celebrated Ayaka’s birthday together. Darren held up large numbers for us to guess; we knew all of the numbers and then he joined two of the numbers together. The numbers were three and zero and we learnt that when you put them together they make thirty.

We think that Ayaka looks so young and beautiful and we all gave her special wishes on the back of our hearts.

When she opened up the envelope with her name on, she pulled out a string of all of our hearts. Shoko held one end and Darren held the other end and then Ayaka counted them. We thought that maybe she would have 30 hearts but she counted 28. We sang “Happy birthday to you” in English and in Japanese. We stood together in a circle and sang “If you’re happy and you know it” and some of us chose a certain action to do e.g. shout happy birthday, clap your hands, jump up high, whisper happy birthday and nod our heads. Ayaka wore a purple crown which Andres had given her to wear. Noa and Sofia worked together to finish decorating the crown this morning. They used markers, stickers and sparkly pens. Then she invited us to sit down at the table and eat our snacks and she served us a chocolate brownie. In the end we had to eat quickly as Jet arrived for our KIDFIT classes.

Downstairs we started our day with play dough on the table and free play on the mat. We spent time using the “Ampaman” blocks, building towers and rolling balls down from the top. We also enjoyed singing and dancing to the music and reading books with our friends and teachers. At the moment we are focusing on shopping and what we do when we go shopping; what we need and our new theme in February may continue in this way. Our teachers always feel that we learn best when we are interested in something …………..

Upstairs Sean spent the morning trying to put some magnets together and he managed to make a triangle and a long line using the balls and sticks. Jamie completed his hagoita by pasting rhinestones and coloured shapes on it. Our teachers will cover our hagoita with nisu which is like a varnish, so that all the things that we pasted on will stay in place. FJ and Miya put together a big mat of numbers and letters which covered most of the carpet area. We then separated the letters from the numbers and discovered that number nine was missing. Luckily Miya had an idea and she turned the number six upside down and it looked like a nine.

We sat at the tables doing transport pictures after first thinking of some examples. These were the some of the things that we thought of viz. FJ – car, Sophie – taxi, Miya – bus, Jamie – Airplane, Shoko – helicopter, Noa – train, Emily – balloon, Sofia – motorbike. We then added more vehicles to our drawings which are works in progress. We used coloured pencils to colour in the pictures that we had drawn using just lead pencils.

Our KIDFIT lesson is continuing to focus on our heart. We now know that our heart is in our chest and the heart shape that we all know is called a Valentine heart. Our real heart is a completely different shape. It has pipes coming out of it. We learnt that in order for our heart to work well we need to eat healthy food, do exercise and have enough sleep. We loved doing the obstacle course again and rush through most of the stations in order to crawl through the tunnel and then get to the mat where we can do a somersault.

We want to wish all of our friends, families and teachers a great weekend and looking forward to a new busy week ahead at Ohana.

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