Birthday Walk

April 12th, 2018

Dear Parents,

We wished our April birthday celebrants – Tem, Taii and Shi a very Happy Birthday today. Wish you all a year full of joy, love and happiness. It was so fun to celebrate their birthday in class today together with Shi’s mum Aya and and dad John, Tai’s mum Kyoko and Tem’s mum Rina. After we introduced each other by singing the ‘Hello’ song, Tem, Tai and Shi did the birthday walk.

We gifted them a birthday crown to make them look like ‘Birthday King’ and they held the globe in their hands and walked around the image of the sun. As we walked around, we sang ‘the earth goes around the sun, the earth goes around the sun, the earth goes around the sun and children turn one …’ so on and so forth till Shi went around the sun 3 times (since he turned 3) and Tai and Tem 4 times (since they turn 4). After all the earth takes one year to go around the sun and hence we had go around in a circle as many times as our age.

After the birthday walk, we wished them by singing the birthday song and gifted them a birthday card. Thereafter, we split in two groups to do different activities and then swapped. One of the activities we did with Rina and Kyoko was decorating the pancakes. There were pancakes and we used fresh cream, Choco chip, raisins and raspberry to decorate it. It was so delicious! Yum Yum!! The second activity with Aya was making the paper balls by squashing the newspaper with our hands and then covering it with origami paper to aim inside an egg carton for points. Both the activities were very fun. Finally, John read us all a wonderful funny Dr. Seuss storybook.

We wished the birthday friends one more time in English and then in Japanese and then bid good bye to their parents and thanked them for coming and celebrating with us.

We had such a busy day today and couldn’t go to the park. However, we worked out with Maryna during our Music and Movement session. Dancing with her is always so fun and we had a long session today as we began by doing the stretches first to improve our flexibility and then danced to many of our favorite songs including the transportation song, chicken dance and peel the banana song. We did some stretches again after the dance routine and said good bye to her like a ballerina by doing the curtsy. We are thinking of songs to dance on for our end of the year party currently and will be starting our rehearsals soon. Can you believe it that it’s the end of the year already? Where did the time go?

Dolls and doll house was so popular today and many of us spent long time playing with it and had many conversations with our friends. Our teachers love to hear what we are talking about and many times record it for documentation to make our learning visible. One funny conversation today was between Tai and A. They pretended to be daddy and mummy and resolved to look after their baby together.

We continued with our mung beans planting as well as season tree decoration and also played with cars and building blocks. Later in the day, we continued our conversation about ‘Being Responsible’ and discussed in particular about being responsible in the community. This is our conversation –

Teacher – What does it mean by being responsible?

Tai – Wipe a placemat

A – Packing away and cleaning mat is responsible

Tem – Close the zip of backpack

Ant – Clean the placemat

So – Help mummy

Teacher – Great Ideas! How can we be responsible in our community? In our neighborhood?

Sar – Be quiet because neighbor

Tem – Don’t touch other’s house

Mo – Don’t knock other people’s house because not your house because neighbor’s house.

Li (in reply to what Mo said) – People will say ‘No, thank you’

Tem – Throw paper in the bin, not park

A – Close the water when finish using

Tem – Switch the light off when finish

Teacher – What can we do when we find a missing phone or a bag?

Li – Take it policeman when you find something

Er – Don’t snatch people’s things  

As you can tell, we had a super busy but exciting day today. How was your day? We are looking forward to seeing many of you tonight for our fundraising event Ohana Gives Back!

Love,

Little dancers in Petals Class