Welcome William and Jonah and belated happy birthday Lilian

We welcomed William B and Jonah to our class this morning. Together we enjoyed a full day, reveling in the opportunity to play outside and embracing the warm sunshine. Today on our large “sand tray” we played with rice, marbles and herbs. We used this rice during summer school and kept it in the refrigerator so it was lovely and cool to the touch. It is of course, uncooked rice and the herbs that were in it, still had a lovely smell. The herb is called rosemary. We used cups and spoons in the tray and will play with it again tomorrow.

Our friends, who attend school on a Tuesday, pasted their facial features onto a foam face just like we did yesterday, and Mika and Lucinda did their self portrait with Shelley at the drawing table. When we have their “name stories”, we will put their drawings up on display. We like looking at our work in our classroom and enjoy listening to the stories about our names.

We had a visit this morning from Christine in the office. She came up to our classroom so that we could do a celebration for Lilian’s third birthday which was in the holidays. We improvised a cake using play dough and a pretty bowl, decorated with red fluffy paper. There were three candles in the pretend cupcake so we knew that Lilian was three years old. We counted three fingers and sang “Three little candles”. Each time we blew one of the candles out, we realized that there was one less. We sang the song until there were zero candles left which means that there were no candles remaining.

Lucinda gave Lilian her crown and Mika gave her a beautiful card from us all which Hisami had made. Hisami is so good at making things and decorating cards; thanks Hisami for making such a beautiful card for our friends. In the card, there were pictures of all of our classmates and teachers as well as our handprint and some facts about us e. g. our height, weight, favourite colour etc. You can see from the photos that Christine also blew her candles out too. After Lilian blew the real candles out, Christine read a book to us. It was not an ordinary book and didn’t look like an ordinary book at all. In fact it was a GIANT BOOK. It is way too big for our library shelf. It is one of our favourites “Brown Bear”. Lilian was so excited when Christine was reading the story; she jumped up and down and imitated all the animals that are represented in the book. Lilian, Christine, Ava and Bill donated the book to us on the occasion of Lilian and Ava’s birthdays. In fact they gave us one of the books that is on our Book List called “Harold and the purple crayon”. We want to say a huge thank you to them all for the beautiful gift, which we will treasure. It is the first of our Big Books that have been on our wish list for a long time.

Lilian and Vincent started doing a 54 piece puzzle which they will continue doing tomorrow. They made the entire frame and then took it apart. Tomorrow they can start it and leave it on the table even if they are not yet finished. A puzzle can be a work in progress just like our art projects; so we can take a few days to complete it. We sang our greeting song “Hello ………ohayo gozaimasu” and many of us are singing the words with confidence when it comes to our turn. Our teachers’ faces light up with huge smiles when we sing the words as they are surprised how quickly we learnt them. We counted 11 children in our class today which was the most that we have had this year. We are glad that our friends are returning to Tokyo so they can start school and enjoy learning through play just like we do.

We had a great time outdoors with all of our friends from Ohana. It was fun to be together playing in the park; using sand toys; exploring nature; climbing and running around.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel