Welcome Back Flowers

A big welcome back to everyone. We hope you all had a great break and it was wonderful to see so many smiling faces in the classroom this morning. We were really amazed to see the children come in and immediately remember their morning jobs. We were joined by our new friends Eito, Nile and Rico this morning who settled in really well and soon started playing quietly with their friends. Eito headed straight for the carpet and enjoyed himself with Marc, Ethan and Ryan playing with the Lego, toy cars and trucks. We set up on the tables the new snack and lunch placemats for the children to decorate themselves. They had a choice of colored markers, stamps and stickers. They also practiced writing their own names on them too. On the second table the play-dough was very popular because it looked just like biscuit dough and there were lots of new cookie cutters and modelling tools to use with it. Next to the play-dough we secretly put out a birthday card for Nanako which we decorated with markers. We had to hide it from her when she walked past so that we were able to surprise her with it later. In the play area the children noticed that there were some new costumes and Ava immediately wanted to put on the mermaid costume. Tokutaro decided he liked the Peter Pan costume and wore it for a while but said the hat made him “too hot”. After clearing away the toys we got ready for our special birthday party for Nanako. We were soon joined by the children from ‘Buds class’ and ‘Petals class’. We started off by reading the book ‘On the day you were born’ which showed lots of animals and a nice picture of the earth. Nanako looked very happy as we gave her a birthday card from each class and Jennifer got her a beautiful golden crown to wear. We sang along to “If you’re happy and you know it and all stood up to do the actions to the song. Some of the children suggested doing actions such as ‘turning around’ and ‘jumping sideways’. This was lots of fun. Nanako then blew out the candles on a tiny cake and told everyone she was 10 years old. We are not sure if she was telling the truth or not. After snack time Nanako read a book titled ‘Jungle puzzle’. In circle time we started off by singing our ‘Good morning’ song so that we can get to learn our friend’s names. We all said good morning to our friends sitting next to us and asked them how they were. We then noticed some of the children were a little distracted and excited and so we decided to see if they had some good ideas for classroom rules. Together we came up with the following classroom rules: Use our listening ears, Walking feet in the classroom, Use our indoor voices in the classroom, Be gentle with the toys, Being careful on the stairs, share toys, books, pencils, markers and play-dough, hold the rope when going to the park and lastly, be gentle and nice to our friends. We had sat down for a little while and so we had a lot of fun playing ‘head and shoulders, knees and toes’ which got progressively faster. We also introduced some new body parts to the song such as ankle and Ava suggested our ‘shin-bones’. We have a new name for the class which is ‘Flowers’ and so we all sat in a circle and played the game ‘duck, duck, goose’. This is a game where a child walks around the outside of the circle saying the name “buds”, “buds” as they pass each of their friends. When they say “flowers” the child has to stand up and chase their friend around the circle and back to the original starting position before they can sit down. We had so much fun today even if we didn’t have time for the park and soon realized it was time to say goodbye to ur friends and teachers. We sang our song which goes like this: