Where is the tree?
Today was a very special day since we celebrated Ava and Ai’s 4th birthdays with Ava’s mum Vanessa and her sister, Tara, together with Ai chan’s dad, Lu. We were sorry that Ai’s mum, Hideko didn’t come for the party, but she has influenza. We want to wish her well and hope that all of our friends and their family members who are ill, get better soon. We know that Lu took a video so she will have a window into our classroom and still be able to see the party.
Party time in Flowers Class is a lot fun and today was no different. We had three activities. One activity was painting canvasses; one canvas had Ai chan’s name on it and the other one had Ava’s name on it. We had a selection of pastels and paints to use on the canvas. We tried to wash the brushes each time we wanted to use a different colour. The result was that the canvasses are multi-coloured and look bright and happy. Colours can make you have many feelings; blue can sometimes make people feel sad; red they say is related to an angry feeling; yellow is bright and sometimes a bit harsh to look at; green is soothing and reminds us of nature; black is dark and reminds us of the night and some scary things.
Duck, duck, goose was the second game/activity that we played. A group of our friends sat with Kai on the floor and he explained to us how to play the game. If you are chosen, you walk around the group, tapping your friends on their heads gently, saying “duck, duck, duck”………...and when you are ready you tap on person on the head and you say ‘goose’. Then you have to run as fast as you can and sit down in the ‘goose’s’ place so that they can’t catch you. Then the next person does the same. We loved the game and were filled with joy, animation and excitement when we played it. Most of us managed to escape being caught.
Parfaits! Do you like parfaits? Well, we do! We had a great selection of things to put inside our parfait cups. We had yoghurt, fresh cut up fruit, sprinkles, coco pops, and cornflakes. We made layers inside our cups and then put them aside to eat at snack time. We also had gluten free brownie cupcakes for snack as well as our regular healthy snack.
The party started with Ava and Ai chan sitting at their special table. We always tell our teachers what our birthday friends need so that they look like birthday friends. They need a crown, a present, a card, cake, and candles. Ai chan and Ava chose a friend to put their crowns on and they chose another friend to present them with their cards. We sang “When you’re happy and you know it”, “four little candles”, “Happy birthday to you”, “Otanjobi omedetou”, and we counted in many languages up to four. We want to say a big thank you to Vanessa and Lu for coming to the party and for their generous treats they brought for us for snack. Happy 4th birthday Ava and Ai chan.
We had a wonderful time playing in Amishiro Koen in the warm sunshine. When we got up after rest time, we started to take the tape off our canvas to see how the tree shape looks. We think that our teachers were more curious then we are, however when we started seeing the shape of the tree emerging, we became more and more interested to see how the entire shape would look. Our teachers started to pull the tape off from the ends because it was stuck quite strongly. We will start to fill the tree in next week with similar things to the ones that we put on our OHANA LEARNING TREE. Our teachers like to help us make connections with things that we are learning about, so that what we are learning has more meaning.
Before we started the party we played with puzzles, play dough, blocks, people and one manipulative toy. Actually today, we forgot to mention that at one stage there were 14 children in our class. We counted everyone and then we worked out that seven friends were missing. We divided our class into two groups and did another numeracy game where we worked out that each group had seven children and there were seven children absent……………...and then Natan arrived and the number of children in our class today changed from 14 to 15.
Thanks again for a fun birthday celebration for our friends who are born in January.
OXOXOXOX Flowers Class children