Welcome back and Happy Birthday Nanako
Welcome back for the start of the new school year. We had a great time in Petals class and will talk more about our new class names. When we were upstairs celebrating Nanako’s birthday with all of our friends and teachers in the whole school, Darren told us that our 
classes had names now. We like having names for our classes and are happy to be beautiful, soft, bright, colourful petals.
We started off our day with a small contingent of friends. We were seven friends and four teachers. We all settled really well and were happy to welcome Alexis, who is our new friend at Ohana. She is the oldest in the class and we are looking forward to learning many things from her. As our first day at school progressed, we were 
surprised to learn that our class is a “diaper free” class. Wow, our teachers said as they saw us all using the bathroom independently. We made many big strides during the holidays and have grown up such a lot. Our teachers sometimes don’t like us to grow up too quickly as they like it when we are still little.
You can see from some of the photos that we had fun reconnecting with our friends and teachers as well as celebrating Nanako’s birthday, which was yesterday. We all went upstairs for the celebration to Flowers Class which are the older children in the school. When we arrived we saw that our friends from Buds Class were there too. Darren was reading a book called “On the day you were born” which was a great choice because birthdays are celebrated on the day that we were born and Nanako was born on August 24th which was yesterday. It had 
pictures of a globe and Marc said that he lives there, pointing to the picture. Ethan said that it looked like the earth which was correct. Darren then told us that we all live on the earth. Jennifer was really excited for the birthday to begin and she jumped up as she wanted to give Nanako her crown and place it on her head. Nanako then looked like the birthday queen. Tokutaro gave her one card and 
Michaela gave her another card. She was really happy as you can see from the photos. We sang “If you’re happy and you know it” and chose a variety of actions to perform; we sang “Happy Birthday to you” but we only did this after Nanako had blown out her candle. Just before we lit the candle, we sang “How old are you now?” and then clapped “Are you one? Are you two? Are you three?......” and then when we reached 10, Nanako said that she was 10. And we believed her! Then we lit the candle and she blew it out.
We then went downstairs to have our own snack and morning circle time. In our morning circle, we sang “Let’s all hold hands in a circle” and we sang the days of the week song “There are seven days in a week”. Some of us had turns to place the date, day etc onto the chart. Then we counted how many children were in the class and sang our “Hello” song. We met our new friend who is called a “shoulder buddy”. It sits on your shoulder and has a multifaceted role in the class. The “shoulder buddy” comes from a magical wishing star and 
inside that star is the Land of Understand. There is a special story around “shoulder buddies” which we will listen to tomorrow. We are excited to have a “shoulder buddy in our class and don’t really know what his/her role will be. Our activities this morning centered on playing with play dough and making new place mats for our snack and lunch times. We pasted pictures of food onto our place mats and then we put different coloured stickers on them. 
We already used them for snack time, because our teachers were so quick to laminate them. At the play dough table, we changed the colour of our play dough. Usually you put the colour in when you are making it however this time, we added colour to the readymade dough. We sprinkled the coloured powders onto it and each time we observed it changing colour. In the beginning, it had stripes with red and green; then we added yellow and it was still stripy however when we added blue, it hid all of the other colours. We learnt how to knead the dough so that the colours mixed in well. Shelley started off kneading it and we watched as her hands changed colour too.
Thanks for a fabulous day. See you tomorrow!
Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel