Another week and another celebration, with birthdays and the story Kipper's Birthday by Mick Inkpen. On small world we retold the story of Kipper's birthday. The day before Kipper's birthday, he prepares his party invitations and makes a cake. He invites everyone to his party tomorrow, but is too tired to deliver the invitations until the next day, and that's when the trouble starts. This was the perfect story to teach the Bears about today, yesterday and tomorrow. A tricky concept that even Kipper struggles with. When exactly is my birthday, wondered Kipper.

In role play, we celebrated with a birthday tea party including balloons, banners, party hats, presents, cards and birthday cake. Around the classroom, we worked hard to prepare and make our party a big success. We wrote party lists, inflated balloons, worked with a friend to wrap presents, made cakes, decorated party hats, and created birthday cards for Kipper.

We shared pictures from a birthday and our friends had to guess how old we were from the clues in the photos. Then we wrote about our birthday using our birthday photo to help us.

In our construction area, we were cake designers and bakers, building and balancing layers of a cake and testing them to see if they were stable enough to be carried. We were encouraged to think about how we could make our cake stronger, thinking about how we could join the pieces or stack the layers from largest to smallest. We also created cakes from sand and playdough on our green practical table.