Sayonara Abiya and Happy Birthday Sean
Today is the last day of January and it is in fact, the actual day for celebrating Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year like Japanese New Year and in many other countries, is not celebrated only on one day. It goes on for 15 days and in China it is known as the Lunar New Year or Spring Festival and not Chinese New Year. Tonight and in the coming days, if we go to Yokohama we will see and hear lots of fireworks going off and people will be eating lots of delicious Chinese food.
Today we celebrated Sean’s 6th birthday upstairs with his brother Marc, his mum Marina, his dad Oren and his grandmother. Sean’s dad Oren, read one of Sean’s favourite books called “Planes – Dusty saves the day”. We were all so curious when he read the story and sat intently, listening to him. He is a really good story teller! We want to say a big thank you to Sean’s whole family for coming to celebrate with us at school today and for their generosity. We had lovely heart shaped doughnuts for snack time.
Our huge “Pop Art” art work is almost complete. Today Ethan, Ryan and Noa attached their polka dot shapes to the huge painting. They put glue on the back of their shapes and then smoothed them down with a piece of scrap paper so that they lay flat. We think that it looks amazing and can’t wait to add the finishing touches to it next week. On the second table we did our own original “Pop Art” works using red, blue and pink 
paint. We used the glue caps to make the circles and we also used paint brushes to create other designs.
While we were In the park, Allie found a stone which she said she thought looked like a bird. So we decided to collect stones to use for art work at a later time during February. During circle time, we passed around one of the stones that we had collected in the park and thought about its shape and what it looked like. Jenniefer – mushroom, Ethan – pyramid, Ava – fox, Clodia – a roof, Ryan 
– a cat, Beckett – a triangle. We were so sad that we were not able to see our friend Abiya in person to say goodbye however, her dad, Azif, came to school today and he played a video of her saying goodbye and thank you to all of us. We then recorded a message for her, along with Nanako, Darren, Ayaka and Shelley. We will miss her very much and wish her and her mum and dad a safe return to India and good luck at her new school.
Downstairs, we started working on a large art work for Valentine’s day. We 
used large pieces of coloured paper in pink and red and joined them together to make one huge piece of paper. We pasted different coloured hearts on the paper and will continue working on it next week. We have such a busy month ahead of us with International month, Setsubun, birthdays and Valentine’s day. The new calendar for the upcoming month has pictures of almost all of the countries represented in our class. Our teachers looked at all of our names and these are all of the countries that we or our parents come from. The countries in our class downstairs are England, France, 
Korea, Japan, Germany, Russia, New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, Israel, America, Denmark, The Philippines, Hong Kong, Spain, Singapore and South Africa. We come from so many different places and look how we are all together in one classroom having the most wonderful learning experiences together. We think that the world should be just like our classroom! Today we welcomed Charlie Rutledge to our class. He is Vincent’s new baby and we were so happy to 
meet him. Vincent is really proud of him and so we took this photo of them together.
Tokutaro spent the early part of the morning with us and he made this “oni” out of play dough. The large “oni” in our classroom sits right next to the play dough table so maybe this is what inspired Tokutaro to make it. Hisami read us a Setsubun story called “Mame no kazoe’n’ta”. It was the same story that we read the other day when the mame didn’t like being in the pan. We are looking forward to our celebrations on Monday when we shout “oni wa soto, fuku wa
uchi” and throw mame at the “oni”.
Our KIDFIT lesson about our heart, ended today and all the things that we learnt previously, were reinforced today and during the entire month. We had fun with blow up soccer balls, the hopscotch mat, the red shapes, the rolling mats, the tunnel and the bats and balls. We are looking forward to starting a new lesson next Friday and always remember to get enough rest, eat good food and exercise. We hope everyone enjoys the last day of January 2014 and we really wish our friends who are ill, get better soon! Have a great weekend and see you in February.
Love Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine and Maryna