Making birthday hearts
Today was such a busy day at school for all of us. We started off the year with early outside playtime in the park, however for those of us in Shelley, Nanako, Goh and Sabine’s class; we need a break later in the day. For the past two days we have been going to the park later and it helps break our day more. It seems to be working better with activities as well as we stay in the classroom for almost the entire morning playing and working and having time to sit for longer at the activity tables.
Today we made heart wishes for Lily’s second birthday which will be on Thursday 27th September. We are so happy to be able to celebrate our first birthday for the new school year. We decorated the hearts in two stages; first we drew on them and gave our teachers a wish for Lily; and later in the morning we came back to the activity table, a pasted small colourful mosaic shapes on the hearts to make them look bright and happy. Lily did not make a heart as the birthday girl or boy doesn’t do this, she will make a crown that she will wear at her birthday party at school. The hearts are our gift to our friends. During the earlier part of the day, we played with yellow play dough and sorted things into colourful cups.
When we were sitting together on the mat, we sang our “Hello” song and learnt a new one. This one was called “It’s good to see that Lily is here, it’s good to see that Ava is here, it’s good to see that Tokutaro is here, how are you today?” We all 
then try to answer. Some of us were happy and showed us smiling faces which we all like to see. Then we made sad faces; angry faces; surprised faces; scared faces and sleepy faces. We always shout “wake up” when we pretend to sleep. We sang “Open them, shut them” and throughout the day you can always here us singing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” and “The ABC song”. We even sing it on the way to the park.
Our story was called “Goodnight Moon”. We tried to identify the things that were mentioned in the story e.g. the cow jumping over the moon, the stars, the clock, the old lady saying “hush”, the mittens, the kittens, the socks and many other things. We felt that it was a peaceful story because as we read it, the moon started to disappear in the window and everything was sleeping.
Upstairs we are also making birthday hearts and ours are for Beckett who was sick today. We hope that he will be well enough to come to school on Friday for his birthday party.
The book that we read today was called “The Foot Book”. This book teaches us many new words that when paired are opposites e.g. left, right, wet, dry, low, high, front, back, slow, quick, up, down etc. In our circle time we started to review what we know about our feet. We remembered many things that we can do with our feet and now we can do even more things which we proved to ourselves yesterday, during activity time. We can walk, run, jump, hop etc. as well as paint, hold a ball, draw and play with play dough. Margo and Jamie did their footprint stamping today as well as picking up a ball in between their toes just like some of us did yesterday. We all then held a paint brush with our toes and made the most amazing paintings. We then did another fun game using our feet. We listened to the music on a CD; the song was the ABC song and we had to try, as a team, to pick up as many teddy bear counters as we could and place them inside a big white container. We played this game twice. The first time we managed to pick up 35 counters 
with our toes and the second time we improved our statistics and managed to pick up 48. We laughed a lot while we were playing this game.
Outside in the park while we were watering the flowers, we saw many ants and were curiously observing them as they went about their work and play. We also are doing more experiments with sand and water. Today Jamie was using the waterwheel; he was trying to see whether wet sand, dry sand or water went through the waterwheel the easiest and his conclusion was: water.
Love always Shelley, Darren, Christine, Nanako, Sabine, Ayaka and Goh.