Happy Birthday Ashling
“Oh what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day”
These words come from a song (Shelley often has a song for everything that we say) and we have singing throughout the day in our school; we sing during our morning circle time; when we are having free play; sometimes even during library time; at transition times…………we hear 
singing all the time and this is a great way to learn and remember things. It really was a beautiful day today. Ashling came to school and we were so happy to see her and welcome her back before she leaves for Hong Kong. And what’s more, today is her 3rd birthday so there were so many special things to do in preparation for her party. Her mum, Rachel, baked a cake this morning and she sent the icing separately so that we could ice the cake as one of our activities. Our teachers thought that this was such a great idea as we would all be able to participate in this activity and feel that we had contributed towards the party. It was almost as if we were eating the cake that “WE” had made! We all want to say a big thank you to Rachel, Ashling’s mum for thinking of this. The cake was sooooo delicious and there was almost nothing left on our plates after we had eaten it. We will write about the party later on in our journal.
After our free play time, we had a short morning circle time where we sang our greeting songs and then we moved on to the calendar. We counted how many people were at school today with each of us naming a number so we counted 
sequentially. We arrived at number seven which is the same number as there are, days in the week. We then named 
each other a day of the week, for fun. We sang our days of the week song and then spoke about months, days and seasons. Ashling remembered that her birthday was on 29th August. We were all amazed as most of us don’t remember when we were born. So we knew the date for today; Finn knew that it was Monday and because we love the day of the week song where we have to guess what day it is according to pitch, tone and volume, Shelley sang it for us. Again Finn guessed Monday so he placed the word on the chart, together with the sunshine and summer. He was able to find the “s” and the “m” for summer. Nico found the nine and Jamie found the two for the date. Ashling knew that August started with the same letter as her name, so she looked for August and placed in the place for the month.
Our activities this morning were cutting on a black line and then pasting the pieces on a sheet of paper. We could choose the colour of the paper that we were pasting the pieces onto. Then we helped Ashling decorate her crown and 
we all chose different stickers to put on the crown. She had chosen the stickers and we helped her put them on. Then we decorated the cake with icing and edible, colourful stars and hearts. The icing was originally white and Shelley put out some food colouring in case Ashling wanted to make it another colour. In the end she chose blue. So we all had turns to spoon the icing onto the cake and then sprinkle the shapes onto the icing. We sang Happy Birthday to you, When you’re happy and you know it, Ashling is three years old today, Three little candles shining just for you and How old are you now? Thanks for a great day
Love Shelley, Darren and Kanako