Ohana Iron Chefs - Japan - Takoyaki

The Ohana Iron Chefs were all busy cooking and being creative today. This week is the start of our “Iron Chefs” week and Nanako and Liezel, who are our teachers for the week, prepared some amazing things for us today. They set such a high standard for the whole week. The tables were full of so many things including bowls, a takoyaki cooking pan, flour, water, sausage, cheese, spring onions, egg and a pinch of salt. One the second activity table, there were pieces of paper with a rectangle and in the middle of the rectangle there was a circle. Our cooking experiences this week are taking us to many different countries and today we were in Japan. The paper on the table was for the flag of Japan which where we are all living at the moment. Our job was to colour the circle in red; cut it out, attach a chopstick to the one side of the rectangle and paste a piece of paper on the back which said “Japan, ohio gozaimasu”.

When all of our friends arrived from the class upstairs, we stood together and held hands in an enormous circle. There were so many of us at school today. We sang and did actions to the song “Let’s all hold hands in a circle”. We blinked our eyes, bent our knees, swayed, clapped our hands, kicked our legs, jumped up high and then sat down. Nanako asked us if we remembered how to sing our good morning song that Ayaka had taught us two weeks ago. We all sang our names using the Japanese words to introduce the song. All over the world, there are many countries and each country has its own language that most of the people speak. Here in Japan, most people speak Japanese so that is why we learnt a few more Japanese words and songs. Almost all of us sang our names in the correct place and then we stood up and learnt the words for head, shoulders, knees, eyes, ears, mouth and nose. The song we sang was similar to “Heads and shoulders”. A head is “atama”; shoulders are “kata” and knees are “hiza”.

We did the cooking and activities in different groups and each time that we were the chefs, we wore these wonderful chefs’ hats. You can see that we look like real chefs. When our teachers asked us if we knew what we were going to be today; Sofia and Beckett said “chefs”. There were so many activities for us to do today. The second table activity was making “teru bozu” out of tissues and a rubber band. If you hang your “teru bozu” in the window when it is raining, people believe that the rain will stop. It has been raining so much here in Tokyo, we think that the ‘teru bozu’ may help bring the sunshine out. The funny thing was that later in the day, the sun did come out so maybe our “teru bozu” really worked. We drew with markers gently on a tissue because tissue are quite flimsy and can tear easily. Then we crinkled another tissue into a ball, wrapped the tissue that we had drawn on around the ball and then put the rubber band around the neck part. Some of us drew a face on it too.

We had even more activities to do later in the day. Upstairs, we did ours when we returned from the park and downstairs, we did ours when we came back from the MPR. Upstairs we did salt painting. We used stamps, brushes and bottles to make patterns on black paper with glue. Some of us even wrote our names with the glue. We sprinkled salt onto the glue and then took some food colouring and dropped the colour onto the salt. It was like magic! When we applied the colour, it spread quickly wherever the salt was. The tricky part of this activity is that the salt eventually evaporates and disappears and there will be no salt on our pages.

Downstairs, we did cornflour painting. We used cornflour that was pink, green, blue, yellow and orange and we painted on white paper with it. We loved the painting and when our teachers wanted to pack away for our lunch, some of us wanted to keep on painting.

Thanks for an amazing day Nanako and Liezel…tomorrow we are going to be chefs in the Philippines.

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