Happy birthday Nanako

It was lovely to welcome back some of our friends today after the long silver week holiday. We were glad to have another beautiful Autumn/Fall day so that we could have snack on the deck outside and play with some of the things that are there. This morning we celebrated Nanako’s birthday because she was away when it was the actual birthday. We all gathered together in Buds Class and John played the guitar. We sang ‘when you’re happy and you know it’ and performed many actions. Then we looked at Nanako and saw that she needed to look like a birthday person; one of our friends in Petals Class placed a crown on her head and one person from each class was selected to give her a special card that we all made. We made little people

using our finger prints (Hisami drew legs and arms and a head for us) and there was a pop up cake on our card. We told our teachers that when you celebrate your birthday, you need to have candles so Maki put candles in a cake, Hisami switched the lights off and we sang “Happy birthday to you”. We counted up to three in Japanese and then she blew the candles out; we then sang “Happy birthday” again after she had blown the candles out, in both English and Japanese. We also shouted hooray! We love Nanako very much and are glad that we could celebrate with all of our Ohana friends.

Before we went downstairs to Buds Class for the party, we started one of our art experiences. At the table, we had pieces of paper in the shape of small squares. They were small origami squares. We have special squeezing punches which you squeeze with your entire hand. First you slide a piece of paper into the slot and when you squeeze, a little shape comes out. We had sun shapes, snowflakes, a tree, a heart and a star. We made many shapes in many colours. This activity is really good for fine motor co-ordination and some of us really loved squeezing the punches and seeing what shape would come out. At the second activity table, which we started later in the morning, we traced shapes onto a

piece of paper and then cut the shapes out. We traced a square from a piece of Lego, a wooden triangle, a rectangular piece of Lego and a circle from tape. Our teachers give us opportunities to develop skills which we are still learning and they always let us experience success, in everything that we do. In this activity, they guided those of us who needed help with the tracing and when it was time to cut, we could cut on the line of the shapes or we could just cut haphazardly.

We read a wonderful story which we helped our teachers read. It is called “Polar bear, polar bear, what do you hear”. We made the sounds of some of the animals in the book but many of them we were not familiar with. We don’t know what sound a walrus makes or a hippopotamus. When we were outside in the park, we ran in the green area, shouting with delight while we chased our friends. We were happy that we took our water bottles with us because we were really thirsty from all the exercise. We have noticed that there are many people walking in the nieghbourhood today and over the past two days. It is lovely to look out of our windows and see life on the streets. We think that there are more people walking because they are on holiday. We hope that everyone has a great afternoon and we look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow, back at school. Love always, all the children in Petals Class