Happy birthday Sean

Happy Birthday to Sean, Happy birthday to you

Today was Sean’s birthday and we celebrated with him and his mum and dad and they brought a feast of doughnuts for us to eat. There were so many that we shared them with our friends on the second floor. Yummmmm! We want to say a big thank you to Sean and his parents for coming to celebrate with us and for their generosity.

Downstairs we welcomed Kyle who came for the trial day today. He came with his mum and his baby sister and he joined in with all of our games and activities. He particularly enjoyed the matching game that we played on the carpet. We named the pictures that we saw and had to pair the ones that we had with the ones that were laid out. We always manage to match them all and Shelley now thinks that we can do more challenging games. We however like to do the same things over and over as this is how we learn best and remember things. We think that our teachers know this! At the activity tables we had hearts which we completed for Vincent’s party and we also decorated his purple crown and Darren drew beautiful sunflowers on his gift envelope. Allie did a special drawing on her heart for him. She made a cake with two candles on it.

During our circle time we spoke about bees and sang our song “Wake up”. We also curled our fingers into one another as if our fingers were bees in a hive and Shelley sang “Here is the beehive”. The bees come out and fly to gather nectar and pollen and then they come back to the hive. We stood and held hands in a circle and jumped, nodded our heads, blinked our eyes, swayed our bodies and then when we were sitting down, we sang good morning in Tagalog, French, English, Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese, Afrikaans and German.

We enjoyed dressing up today and spent the entire morning in our dress up clothes until we went outside to play in the park. We wore hats during our circle time too and carried hand bags. We are very involved in social and dramatic play each day. We looked at books during library time but then Shelley had a very important meeting, the result of which you probably heard about in an earlier email or will hear about later today.

Upstairs we had 14 children in our class and as mentioned before we happily celebrated Sean’s birthday before snack time. Hi dad read a book about cars to us and we sang “If you’re happy and you know it” and “Happy birthday”. Sean had five candles to blow out as he turned five today.

We sang our transport song “Fly through the air” and both Yossi and Noa won the dice roll so they were co-pilots. On a real airplane there are usually two people in the cockpit so today we felt really safe with our co-pilots! We had to present our tickets and passports when we went through immigration just like we do when are really travelling on an airplane.

FJ, Miya and Sophie all helped decorate Miya’s crown. FJ drew a superhero using coloured markers. Once again the junk art table was really busy and Marie made a train using black circles for the wheels. Emily used clear plastic containers for her car.

In the library we read “The Wheels on the bus”. Today we actually didn’t really read it, we sang it; we meaning only the children and none of our teachers. They just turned the pages and we sang the entire song. We had to look really carefully at the pictures to see what was happening and what we had to sing about.

During circle time upstairs, we worked with identifying the numerical symbols 1 to 20. We have a rubber puzzle with all of the number symbols, 1 to 20. We used the numbers in relation to how many people were in our class today. We counted thirteen children and three teachers. We worked out when we counted the numbers on the puzzle that thirteen was a one and three next to one another. Then we had to think about the concepts more and less. Were there more children or more teachers (Sam was in our class for part of the morning so she was teacher number three). We worked out that thirteen was more than three so there were more children than teachers in our class today. In fact we know that there are always more children than teachers in our class every day.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine.