Happy Birthday Sofia

     Happy birthday to Sofia, happy birthday to you

Sofia and her mum and dad made such beautiful big cupcakes for her birthday today. We loved eating them and had a wonderful time celebrating with them at school. Sofia was so proud that she is now four years old and she should be. She is a great friend, she shares, she plays, she is fun to be with and she is kind, caring and gentle. Sofia’s dad read her favourite book which is called “Skippyjon Jones”. It is about a dog that thinks he is a cat. Sofia sometimes thinks she is a cat too! We sang “If you’re happy and you know it” and “Happy birthday to you” in both English and Japanese. Sofia and her mum and dad helped her open her gift that we made and judging by the look on her face, we think she loved it very much.

During circle time we cut out our pieces of paper with patterns on them, into shapes of sea creatures. We made rays, octopi, squid, jelly fish and many other fish. We then pasted them onto paper and added plastic wiggly eyes. Some of us wanted to draw seaweed with green markers so we did this too. The pictures look great and you can really see that they are underwater scenes.

You can see in the background of some of our photos, all the boxes read to be packed up for our big move on Friday. We are enjoying school just as much as before and our teachers always say that less is more. It is interesting to see how much you can learn and achieve with just a little. Not all children who go to school have so many things to play with and yet they are all able to learn.

Our story upstairs was called “The Pirate Cruncher” and it was such a silly story. It was about a monster that lures greedy pirates to an island where he plans to eat them and their ships. We know that there are no such things as monsters! In fact downstairs there is a CD with a story on it called “I’m not scared of monsters”.

Downstairs, we did threading again as we love the sparkly and shiny beads. Today some of us decided that the necklaces we made can be for our mums. When we went to the park, we collected a whole lot of small rocks which we brought back to our classroom in a bag. We didn’t have to wash our hands as we usually do when we return from the park, as we were going to do a planting activity. We counted six children in our class today and there were six green pots on the table. We placed some rocks in the bottom of the pot and then filled the pot up with rich brown soil. Nanako gave us food for the plants which we also put in the soil and tried to push them deep into the pot. Then we opened a packet of seeds and while we know that seeds are small, we couldn’t believe how small these ones were. They were teeny weeny ones that looked like a tiny flea. We made a hole in the soil with our fingers and put the teeny weeny seeds into the hole and then covered them up. We watered them because they need water if they are going to grow and now they are on our shelf waiting to grow. We will take them home later in the week and look after them at home.

We learnt that seeds need some sunshine, some shade, water and lots of loving care and then they will grow. When we were finished we said: “Grow little seed grow big, grow little seed, grow strong”.

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