Happy Birthday Vincent; Happy Valentine's Day everyone

“I love you” is what we remembered to tell our families, friends and teachers today, as it is Valentine’s Day. Marie and Margo decorated their small picture frames with foam shapes this morning as a gift for Valentine’s Day. Many of us made cards with pipe cleaner hearts just like our friends did yesterday and we really appreciate that our teachers prepare activities sometimes on consecutive days so that all of us have the opportunity to have similar learning experiences and not miss out on things. All of us who made cards today also tried to write “I love you” on the front and “Happy Valentine’s Day” inside. Many of us love dramatic and imaginative play when we are at school and today Miya, Emily and Nico built a pirate ship out of cushions and “sailed the high seas” this morning.

In the library, we read the story “Hugs and Kisses” which is about how love comes back to you when you give it. We have a song called “Love is something if you give it away, it will come right back to you”. This story made us think about this song. We tried throwing kisses to our friends and teachers and when we caught them, we sent some back to them. The story has animal characters in it and when we had finished reading it, we looked around the classroom at all of the animals that we have to see if we could find the same animals. We have plastic animals and soft toy animals and we managed to find a fox just like in the story. The fox from our classroom went all around the room giving kisses to us.

 We sang “Where is thumb kin” and “Love is something”. Another activity that we did today was making a heart with our fingers. We made a circle shape with our fingers too and looked through it as if it was a spyglass and then we made a rectangle and pretended to take a photo of our friends. Just like our friends downstairs learnt that you can communicate with people using gestures, rather than speaking, we learnt that you can use your hands to make things and people can see what they are when we say something e.g. when we wanted our friends to know that we had a camera, we held the shape up and said “cheese” or smile; that is when they understood what we were doing.

We sang songs and did the actions to some sounds in our “Jolly Phonics” programme. The letters were “s, a, t, i, p, n, c, k, e” and the new sound today was “r”. We had a selection of pictures that start with the “r” sound e.g. rose, rat, robot, rabbit and rocket.

 Downstairs we celebrated Vincent’s second birthday with his mum and dad. We started off holding hands in a circle, singing and doing actions. We also sang “good morning” in different languages e.g. French, Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Hebrew, Tagalog and Afrikaans. We looked at Vincent and wondered what he needed to make him look like a birthday king. Clodia touched her head as she knew that something needed to go on her head and Lily called out “crown”. Lily went to find the purple crown and placed it on his head. We then sang “When you’re happy and you know it” and we shouted “Happy Birthday” and then we whispered “Happy Birthday”. We chose to jump, stamp our feet and clap our hands too. We sang a song asking Vincent how old he is; “How old are you now?” and he told us that he was two and held up two fingers. We sang “Three little candles” and blew each one out until there were none; our fingers were our pretend candles. Clodia presented Vincent with his special gift from us which was a long chain of hearts which he can hang in his room. We made them with love for him. We went to the table and switched off all of the lights and lit his candle that was in the shape of the number two. He blew it out and we sang “Happy birthday to you” in English and Japanese. We had delicious egg free cupcakes and strawberries and grapes for our birthday treat. We love licking the frosting off cupcakes but don’t like eating the actual cake so much and today was no different. We want to thank Vincent and his mum, Mayuko and his dad, John for coming to the party and for making such a delicious feast for us. Afterwards we went outside to play in the park and when we came back, Allie had the chance to do her pink and red pasting which represents Valentine’s Day. Our paintings and pictures are already in our Portfolios which are filling up each week. We are missing Santiago and Andres Felipe and hope that they will be back soon.

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