Happy birthday Quentin!

Today started off all cold and rainy and then the sun came out and it brightened the day instantly. Unfortunately when we did our “Today is ………….” chart, the weather was cloudy and we didn’t end up changing it to sunny. We started off our day a little differently as we were having a birthday party around snack time. We had activities at the tables at the beginning of the day and a small amount of free play later on. At the tables we had drawing for Koyo and Constant for the birthday gift for Quentin. They had to decorate their cars which we then laminated and attached to the chain or ribbon that was attached to the rest of our cars. Shelley made a beautiful big envelope and placed the gift inside it. Quentin was so surprised when he opened it. Even though he knew that we were making car cards for him, because he chose them; he wasn’t sure how we were going to present them to him. We think that he really liked them. We are back tracking a bit on our day so that we try to include all the things that we did. While Koyo and Constant were decorating their cards, we played with play dough. We had rollers and some knives and trees. We focused more on the knives and rolling and most of us made balls and snakes and we watched our teachers make some wonderful shapes. There were sharks and snowmen and snakes and snails and…………………… We also had some time to draw at the free drawing and office table. After that we tidied up and went to the mat to have our morning circle. We were very happy to welcome Constant’s mom, Janice, his Aunty Connie and his cousin, Joyce to our class for a short time this morning.

They joined in with our morning circle time and learnt the words of our ‘Hello” song so quickly. We sang “Open them, shut them” the right way and our silly, upside down way too; we also sang “Heads and Shoulders”. This time we sang it while omitting one action each time and then at the very end we sang the whole song again. It took a long time to go through each line however we persevered and smiled while we were singing it, as we were having fun. We also sang “There are seven days in a week” and eventually we worked out that today was Friday.

We had a short free play time and then Quentin and his mum and brother arrived. We packed away and then were all ready to start the party. Quentin sat on a chair wearing his crown and it seemed as though he felt really proud of himself; and that he had a really important role to play to play. We all stood up and asked him if he felt happy or sad today. And, of course he said that he felt happy. So we sang, “When you’re happy and you know it” doing actions like clapping our hands, stamping our feet, winking our eye, nodding our head, shouting “happy birthday” and then we ended off with whispering “happy birthday”. Then he showed us how old he is with the fingers on one of his hands. He hid his thumb and showed us four fingers. We counted to four in English, German, Japanese, Afrikaans, Chinese and French. Then Shelley sang a song “Quentin is four years old today” and we gave him the special gift that we had made for him. He held the one end and Shelley held the other so that he could see how beautiful all the cars looked, connected together on the ribbon.

Quentin invited us individually to the table and we lit his candles and sang “Happy Birthday to you”. We lit the candles one more time and sang “Four little candles”. Each time we blew one candle out until there were none. Our candles were our fingers and Quentin’s candles were the real ones on his cake. We ate a piece of cake for snack time as well as our snack and then went to the library for story time. We read two stories that were flap book stories. The one was about a baby and what they were hiding behind each thing and the other one was a “Maisy” story and each time we had to open a door, open the closet door, life the towel etc and we discovered something hiding there too. We went outside afterwards and had fun in the sun except some of us got a little wet when we were splashing in the puddles. Our teachers don’t mind us splashing however they want us to understand what happens when we splash; we get wet sometimes and this is what happened to some of us. We changed our clothes when we returned to school. It was a fun day and thanks to Quentin and his mum for the yummy cake.

Wishing you all a great weekend

Love Shelley and Darren