Cooking gyoza

Today was a warmish day outside and now that we have so many children at school on one day, Tokutaro ended up wearing one of the teacher’s smocks that they tied on the side to make it shorter. Darren is making new smocks for us so soon we will all have one and the teachers will have one too. There are so many things that we will be doing for our new school soon and we are really excited about having new classrooms and with new spaces to explore and a new park to play in. Sometimes we will come to Amishiro Koen as it is a great place for Sports Day and Step Park has different equipment in it. Step Park will be our new playground.

We went to the park earlier from the upstairs classroom and when we returned we did our circle time. In our circle time we continued with our transport theme and number concept. Ayaka did some numbers in Japanese which included counting and writing in Japanese. We learnt the kanji for numbers one, two, three, four, five and six. We used the dice for choosing a number.

 With Valentine’s Day coming next week, and school closed on Monday and Tuesday, preparing for all our special days needs to be done well in advance. We used foam photo frames and the way we chose them was from hats. Darren put the different shapes into a hat, and we closed our eyes and chose one. This is the one that we will use for our gifts.

Many of us built towers using the Kapla blocks this morning. We built them quite high and in fact they were longer than our arms and this is where we experienced a dilemma. If we dropped something down into the centre of the tower, we could not retrieve it easily. What were we going to do? We had to think of possibly using another object to pick it up but what could we use? We did not come to a conclusion and will maybe try to work something out tomorrow. When Shelley walked into our classroom earlier this morning she was amazed to see how busy we all were, especially those of us working at the activity tables.

In the library, we read “Boomerang Race”. We really love listening to stories and once we are finished reading the story, we always discuss the story and answer questions. At the moment we are focusing on transport, in keeping with our theme and we then look in the books for examples of transport that we know or new ones.

 Downstairs we put on our oni masks and said: “Oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi”. Some of us wanted to still be in the photo even though we didn’t have our masks on. The second photo of us is related to Chinese New Year. We have been making snakes as it is the year of the snake; learning how to say Happy New Year in Chinese which is “Gong Hay Fat Choy” and today we did cooking. We learnt that Goh san knows how to speak Chinese and she knows all about things from China. In fact she brought lots of things to school with Chinese writing for Chinese New Year. The signs say things like good luck; wishing you a lucky season; may you go and come home filled with peace; may you be successful in all you do; may you have richness in your life. There are so many wishes of good luck that people say for Chinese New Year. Well today, Goh san made gyoza which are “jiyowzu” in Chinese. She mixed onion with nira and chicken mince in a bowl and we smelled it and thought that there was broccoli in it. Shelley talks a lot about broccoli and that it is good for you. We put some of the mince mixture onto a small circle of dough and then pinched it closed in the shape of a semi circle. Then we cooked them in a pan and of course we then ate them. Our classroom smelled of gyoza and we loved eating them. In fact we all ate two gyoza after our snack and some of us had an extra one after lunch.

We read a book called “Snakes” which was a little bit silly. There were so many snakes; big, small, fat, thin etc. Allie and William stuffed their white socks so that they could also have a good luck snake for Chinese New Year. We have all completed our hearts for Valentine’s Day now as well as our heart wishes for Vincent’s birthday next week.

Love always

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