Happy birthday Clodia and Aiden
Today we had two celebrations at school; one was Aiden’s birthday and party and the other one was Clodia’s belated birthday party. Today is Aiden’s actual birthday while Clodia’s was in March during the spring break. Not only we were 
happy to be having celebrations in our new school, we were also so happy that the weather was sunny and warm. When we went to the park to play, we took off our jackets as it was too hot in them. We had some great photos taken during our time in the park where there were lots of children playing outside in the beautiful sunshine.
When Millie came to school today, she was so amazed at the Velcro wall and how the pipes stayed attached to it. She spent a long time making adjustments to the existing marble run so that eventually the balls would fall into a container rather than just roll on the floor. Miya, Marie and FJ tried the listening centre while Noa made herself a beautiful placemat.
As a group, we all sat together at the tables and started to or continued to make our pirate ships out of pet bottles and other materials. We then placed them onto the paper ocean. Just before we were about to start our circle time, guess who arrived? Yes, the birthday boy, Aiden. We started off his party by reading two books; one was called “Don’t step on the crack” and the other was called “Guess how much I love you”. In the second book we copied the actions that they did in the story by stretching our arm out wide, stretching them up to the sky etc. We sang “Where is thumbkin” and then “If you’re happy and you know it”. Our next game was called “Follow the 
leader” and we had to listen to the instructions that Darren was giving us but not copy him if he was tricking us. We also learnt two new words which were elbow and knuckles.
Aiden’s mum Yuko brought the yummiest ice cream cake for us to eat after our healthy snacks. Aiden was smiling all the time and if you see the photos from other times during the day, he was still smiling. We think that he had a great birthday and was really happy!
Downstairs we also celebrated a birthday party; it was Clodia’s third birthday party. She was so happy to share this special day with her mum who brought a beautiful book called “Emily’s balloons” to read to us. In fact, Frances ended up reading about five books to us and she reads stories in such a beautiful way. Thanks Frances for reading so many stories to us!
We started off Clodia’s party thinking about what happens when we have a birthday. Clodia said that you get presents; Lily said that you can wear a crown so she went to find Clodia’s and placed 
it gently on her head. Now she looked like a queen and we could see how proud she felt with the crown on her head. We sang “How old are you now?” and Clodia told us that she was three and she held up three fingers to show us. Then we all sang “She’s three years old now”. We all stood up and sang “If you’re happy and you know it” and we tried to choose different actions to do however it became a bit competitive with some of us and so our teachers helped us. We stamped our feet, turned around, shouted ‘happy birthday’ and whispered ‘happy birthday’ too. Then Tokutaro presented Clodia with her gift of a chain of hearts from us and he gave her a kiss and said ‘happy birthday’. Frances had some yummy treats for our snack time. We had ‘egg free’ cupcakes which were delicious, popcorn and edamame. We want to say a big thank you to Frances for all her treats and stories and for everything. Clodia’s candles were sparkly ones and you had to blow really hard otherwise they lit up again after you thought you had blown them out.
Liam completed his place mat and the rest of us did drawing and cutting. We also spent time doing more challenging puzzles later in the day. One had shapes on it and the other one was different machines that dig holes, remove the dirt etc.
Our story which we read just before the birthday party was called “The Happy Bee”. Many of us remember the information that we learnt about bees e.g. pollen, nectar, honey, flowers etc. Next week we will start looking at other insects and how they grow and what they are able to make.
Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.