Happy birthday Sabine, Goh and Liezel
It was a great start to our new week and today was the first day that both classes went to the park. Our little friends downstairs walked all the way to the park, holding the rope and they did the same thing all the way back to school. They happily held the rope and held their teachers hands and everyone sang 
together. In the park, we were happy to see a new ladder going up to the slide which is a lot safer and easier to climb, than the one previously. Hana climbed confidently all by herself and came sliding down alone with a big smile on her face. Elisa enjoyed digging in the sandbox and Luke enjoyed filling containers up with water, at the tap. Zachary also loves playing with water and so he spent much of his time in the park at the tap. Marc loves climbing and swinging and running around; and in fact, when he arrived at school this morning, he had a big smile on his face…..yay!
In our classroom this morning, we had a long tunnel to crawl through, that was made out of cardboard from a large box. Marc and Zachary especially enjoyed crawling through it while Luke enjoyed crawling through the spaces in the room divider. At the one activity table, we played with play dough and on the floor, we had blocks to build with or use however we wanted to; because the theme this 
week is “Let’s build”. The project for today was to make a boat out of cardboard. We will draw on them and then put them together using tape or glue, during the week and by the end of the week, all of our projects will be completed.
We had a lovely story time together with Tokutaro, Clodia, Olivia and Lily who came to our classroom to play (their old classroom). We read the book called “Peanut, peanut butter, jelly”. We helped read the words e.g. when Shelley said: “Peanut butter”, we shouted “jelly”. Sometimes we shouted another word and we all laughed. In the story we first bake the bread; then we slice it; then we pick the peanuts and mash 
them; then we spread them; then we pick the grapes and mash them and spread them and then we eat the sandwich. Yumm! We also played musical instruments and sang a new ‘good morning’ song which goes like this: “Hello……ohio gozaimasu, how are you today tell us…….I’m fine thanks, arigatou, we welcome you to our class”.
Upstairs, we arrived at school and found a huge stack of cardboard boxes in different shapes and sizes, all around the room. We started to stack them into towers and we worked together, holding chairs so that our friends could stand on them, and stack the boxes as high as possible. We had a great time doing this. On one of the activity tables, we noticed four tool sets with wooden blocks and woodscrews on it. We listened to all the instructions and rules around using real tools and how to keep safe. We used screwdrivers and had time together to practice how to use them.
After snack time, we all went downstairs so that we could celebrate our teacher’s birthdays. Sabine was yesterday 16th June; Goh is 19th June and Liezel is 3rd July. We decorated cupcakes with icing that was pink, green and white and we sprinkled sprinkles on them. There were three giant blueberry muffins for Sabine, Liezel and Goh and we ate the cupcakes. We counted in many different languages and then we stood up and sang “When you’re happy and 
you know it” and we did many different actions e.g. clap our hands, stamp our feet, wiggle our nose, wink our eye, shout ‘happy birthday’ and whisper ‘happy birthday’. We gave them their envelopes filled with beautiful hearts and wishes and then we sang “happy birthday to you”. Our story today was called “The three little wolves and the big bad pig”. At the one activity table, we decorated a boat made out of stiff paper using coloured markers and then we moved to the floor and as a team, we assembled the most enormous pieces of cardboard into a boat. It is so big that we can put chairs inside it and sit on them, pretending that we are sailing away.
Love always Shelley, Darren, Nanako, Ayaka, Christine, Goh, Liezel and Sabine