Cooking for New Year

We thought that today would be another snowy Monday however it soon stopped and we could go outside and play in the park. Downstairs we had a great morning with our friends and teachers and had an extra cooking activity which marks the end of our theme for the month. We sat together at the table and spoke about the concepts full and empty. We looked inside the pot and saw that there was nothing inside it; then we looked inside the bowls with the vegetables in them and saw that the bowl with the carrots was full; the bowl with the daikon was full and the bowl with the small pieces of mochi in it, was half full. We helped pour the water in the pot, then we put the vegetables in the pot and last but not least we poured the dashi powder in. We mixed the powder in and then our teachers put the pot on the stove to cook.

We were curious about what was going on in the oven, while the dashi was cooking on the stove. The mochi was cut up in small pieces and then we put it into the oven to get crispy and soft. We watched it rise and get bigger and when it came out of the oven, our teachers broke it into smaller pieces and placed some in a bowl for us. When the soup was ready, they poured it over the mochi and we had yummy “zoni” with our lunch. We all tried the soup and of course you can guess who ate it all up…..our littlest Vincent ate everything and so did Tokutaro. Lily, Allie and Clodia enjoyed it too.

We did some junk art at the table and still needed time to explore what to do with the materials. We like to draw inside the yoghurt containers and hold the other things in our hands; look through the toilet rolls etc.

We started to learn about something new today which will lead us into our theme for next month. We sang our “hello” song and then the one where we sing good morning in other languages. Then we sang our “wake up” song and this was the catalyst. We then dramatized bees flying around and when the music stopped we stood on a flower, rolled the pollen on our bodies and drank the nectar up. We eventually flew back to our beehive to make honey. We learnt about the queen bee who lays eggs, the drone or daddy and the worker bees. We sang “Here is the beehive” while we rested on the mat. During the morning we sang another song about a monkey called “Monkey sitting in a tree” and “Nose jolly red nose”. We will use the theme of growth and new beginnings as we head towards spring and continue learning about bees.

Upstairs we are making modes of transport out of junk art. Jenny used wheels to make a car and a yoghurt container to make the body of the car. She attached the wheels using vinyl tape and she coloured parts with markers. Miya was inspired by Jennifer and she decided to make a bus. She looked at the “Wheels of the bus” book in the library and used it as a guide to build her bus. Marie thought about making a junk art train and used the sanding block to clean up the edges of the wheels before building it. We will decorate our junk art transport later in the week.

We read “Rosie’s walk” which is about a chicken that went for a walk in the farmyard, completely oblivious to the fact that she was being followed by a fox who of course wanted to eat her. The fox however was getting into trouble all the time and in the end, he was chased by hundreds of bees and the chicken arrived safely back in its coop.

Our teachers set up some chairs on the carpet and they asked us what we thought it could be. First we thought that it could be the inside of an airplane however our teachers had the idea of a bus in their minds. We spoke about travelling on a bus and what you have to do in order to ride a bus etc. We realized that you need a ticket to ride a bus so we made tickets and wrote the words “bus ticket” on them. We had to use the tickets if we wanted to ride the bus.

We reviewed the letters “s, t, i, c, k” which were letters that we had written on our bus tickets. We did a dice roll to see who would be the driver as many of us wanted to be the driver. Today Sofia became the bus driver as she had the highest score on the dice roll.

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