Happy Happy Birthdays!

We continued our theme of ‘construction’ today by building lots of things on the tables as well as on the carpet. The children noticed immediately the papier-mâché masks on the table along with lots of decoration materials. To decorate their masks they could choose between using gold or silver paint as a base color for their ‘cat’ masks. After they had painted it we put some glue on and then attached some very small sparkly flower and heart shapes. Also on the table were some bright pink and some bright green feathers which we stuck onto the masks. They are beginning to look very beautiful and look like just like Venetian masks. On the second table we had some pictures of towers from around the world and they instantly recognized the ‘Tokyo Tower’. Using lollipop sticks and colored matchsticks we made our own relief pictures of the Tokyo Tower. First we chose the color for the lollipop stick base of the tower and using some strong glue we placed them carefully on the paper. Once the base was finished we chose different colored matchsticks and glued these on to make the top part of the tower. Also on the table were lots of different colored bottle tops and some plastic string. It was a little surprising to see a snake on the table and soon realized that we were going to make a bottle top snake. The bottle tops all had holes in the top for us to thread them onto the string. We could fit about 10 caps on the string and then the teachers helped us tie the end. We soon added wiggly or sticker eyes and paper tongues to our snakes to make them more realistic. It was funny how they were flexible and could bend when we moved them. After clearing away the toysand art materials we had a special day for three of the teachers; Liezel, Goh san and Sharee. Yes, it was their birthday party today. We all got together with our friends and sang some songs for the teachers gave them crowns to wear, gave them all the beautiful cards we had made for them and also a really nice cake with 3 candles on the top. They blew out the candles together and then Michaela read one of her favorite books to the class, her mum Sharee, Liezel and Goh San. We had lots of fun together and as soon as our party time was over we headed to the park. We had a picnic snack together at the park and played in the shade of the tree today as the sun was quite strong. It was great to hear Blue and Tokutaro singing the ‘cho-cho’ Japanese song together when they spotted a butterfly in the park. When we came back to the school we were very hot and moved to the tables to work a little further on our Venetian masks. We added some more feathers, some sparkly glue and some glitter to them and put them aside to dry. They are looking very nice and we will add some more small details tomorrow before they come home. In the library time we read ‘Don’t step on the crack’ which is a wonderful book about the bad luck that ‘could’ happen if you step on a crack in the pavement i.e. your father could turn into a hippy, your best friend could turn out to be an alien etc. the children love this book and love the funny pictures on each page. All our Love, Darren, Ayaka and Sharee