Happy Birthday
This morning we had a big celebration for Clodia and Elena’s birthday. Ava, Momo and Allie were amongst the first in the classroom this morning and came to the table and started working on Clodia and Elena’s crowns for the birthday party with markers and sparkly pens. 
Tokutaro dressed up like a king with a crown and went into his card castle. He allowed Sean and Arata to enter across the drawbridge and then closed it behind them. On the main table Jennifer, Olivia and Elena helped with our group castle model by adding more newspaper and glued it down with lots of starch glue. It dries pretty quickly and so we will be able to start painting it tomorrow morning. In circle time we read a book titled ‘King Bidgoods in the bathtub’ which the children love as it shows the King eating, fishing, and dancing in the bathtub. Clodia’s parents Frances and Blake then came into the classroom to celebrate her 4th Birthday. It was also Elena’s 6th birthday this month and we had a great time. 
Blake read a Japanese book about a character called Igura who needed to decide which way to go on his journey, for example up like a dolphin or down like a mole. Frances then followed up with a wonderful English book titled ‘Miss Nelson is Back’. We all got up and sang “if you’re happy and you know it” and took suggestions for the actions from the children. We were very lucky to have a 3rd book which Elena brought with her for her birthday titled ‘Frozen’ which told the story of two sisters with special powers to create ice and snow. We then gave Clodia and Elena their birthday cards and crowns which we stretched across the carpet. We were very lucky to see Blake had brought his Banjolely with him to play ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘twinkle twinkle little star’ to the children at the table. They then blew out the candles, made wishes and we had some wonderful pink cupcakes to eat. Thank you Frances for these, they were yummy. 
The park was very warm and we saw our friends, brothers and sisters there too. It was great to see everyone together and we had a lot of fun going down the slide together. We did this over and over again and even the teachers joined in. We hope the weather stays nice and warm so we can have a picnic snack together soon. When we came back from the park we had a few minutes to do some ‘Jolly Phonics’ work. The children are very interested in the sounds of the letters and today we started on a new sound for the letter ‘O’. They know that this letter has two sounds from our song “Old McDonald had some vowels a, e, i, o, u. We looked at the book and saw there were a few objects that begin with this sound such as octopus and ostrich and then Tokutaro spotted the word ‘on’ and Ava spotted ‘off’. We then used our hands to draw a large letter ‘o’ in the sky.
We have some picture cards which we looked at and found some more objects that begin with ‘o’ such as orange, oval, otters, olives and ox. In Shelley’s classroom, we learnt how to use a pair of scissors by putting two fingers (mum and brother fingers) in the big hole and our thumbs in the small hole. 
We then put our thumbs up in the sky and worked on opening and shutting them. We then showed them some ‘scissor magic’ by folding 4 pieces of paper in half and cutting them. When we opened them up we were amazed to see the shapes of a circle, triangle, square and a heart. We then sang our shape song together. After our yummy snacks we put everyone’s name cards on the carpet and tried to remember which ones were our names. 
We looked at the first letters of our names and Koh was very good at this activity and was very good at telling which ones were his friend’s names. Some of the names we noticed are short while others are long and some even start with the same letters. We hope they can tell their own names by the end of the year. Love always, Darren, Shelley, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine, Maryna, Sharee and Rama