Happy birthday Darren and Maryna

Our teachers and many of our parents know the song about the 1^st of May by the Bee Gees. We don’t now, but maybe one day we will; especially since music is something that is constantly recycled and replayed and there are songs that never die. So with it being the first day of a new month, and with Darren and Maryna having their birthdays next week, we decided to celebrate them today. All of our friends gathered together in one classroom and we dressed them up so that they looked more special than they are. Clodia put a crown on Darren’s head and Ava put one on Maryna’s head. We looked at them and wondered how old they were so we sang our song: “How old are you now” and they each replied singing too. Darren counted the candles on the cake and said that he was four because there were four candles while Maryna said that she was five.

We counted up to five in many languages viz. English, Japanese, French, Tagalog, Chinese, German, and Spanish. We held up five fingers and counted them and then we pretended that they were candles. We sang our beautiful candle song and pretended that our fingers were candles. We blew one candle out at a time. We then spoke about the feelings that we have inside our bodies when it is our birthday. Zachary said: “You feel happy” and Tokutaro said: “You shout hooray!” So we all stood up and sang “When you’re happy and you know it”. We whispered “happy birthday” and shouted “hooray” in the song. We presented them with their gifts that we had made for them. We made cards with photos of our faces and our names underneath.

After they had blown out the candles, we all went to sit at the table for snack and ate the delicious fruit skewers that our friends on the first floor had made for all of us. We want to say a big “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” to Maryna and Darren and hope they liked our special celebration that we did with them today.

On the first floor, when we arrived at school we worked with Hisami at the one activity table, where she spent time looking at our puzzle skills in detail and our counting, number recognition, number concept and our ability to “read” names on our flashcards.

On our other activity table we had trays of strawberries, apples, pineapple and oranges all cut up into pieces. We also had a container with long pointy sticks called skewers. Our task today was to put a selection of different fruit onto the skewers. We had to be careful when we put the fruit on as the point was really sharp. We managed to use up all of the fruit and make three full trays for our teachers and friends to eat.

We went to the park as the weather cleared up and boy, did we have fun! Four of our friends were full of mud on their clothes and many of us enjoyed touching the mud and playing with it. Our teachers helped us change when we got back to school at lunch time and we were glad that they let us enjoy being outside playing with the mud.

Upstairs, we looked at many different things from nature under the microscope and through magnifying glasses. We also used the light box and looked at x-rays of animals. Since we are going to be learning about dinosaurs, our teachers used this time, to lead us into a discussion on them. We looked at the bones that you see on an x-ray and we used the waxed Wikistiks and placed them on top of the bones on the x-rays. We looked at sorting and patterning with some new materials. We had different objects in different colours. There were bugs, farm animals, dinosaurs and food. For the patterning exercise our teachers organised the sorting objects into two colours and then five colours and more. We had to see if we could put them in the correct order.

During circle time, Ava, Clodia and Beckett all helped complete the calendar so that it said the new month, which is May and the date etc. Our story today was called “Dinosaur Fright”. We looked at these incredible creatures and never realised that there were so many kinds of dinosaurs. We tried to pronounce some of the names which was tricky and made us laugh a lot. There was a brachiosaurus, an allosaurus, ceratosaurus, diplodocus etc.

In the story that we read, a group of brachiosaurus take over a large lake and the other dinosaurs try to scare them away with spiders webs and fireflies, pretending that they are monsters. We thought that this was really funny because dinosaurs seem like monsters themselves, and how can they be scared of anything? Well, maybe we are all scared of something. After a short rest we started working on our ‘koi nobori’.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Christine, Maryna, Goh, Nanako, Sharee, Liezel, Ayaka and Hisami