The joys of Ukraine

Tuesday, February 17th, 2015 We were so surprised when we looked outside this morning because we saw that the rain had changed into snow. We were happy to watch the snowflakes falling from inside where we were warm; and our snowflakes were nothing compared with the snow that falls in Ukraine each winter. And now that we ???????????????????????????????have mentioned Ukraine, we will share with you the wonderful experience we had this morning. Our beloved Maryna who was born in Ukraine, came to Petals Class to teach us about her birth country. She came into the classroom dressed in traditional clothes that had cross ???????????????????????????????stitch designs on them. Cross stitch is a traditional handicraft in Ukraine and Maryna herself has made many beautiful things which she has in her apartment here in Tokyo.

She first showed us where Ukraine is on the globe and we saw that Tokyo is really far from Ukraine. We can’t walk or run or swim but Michaela said that we can fly on an airplane. Maryna showed us the flag of Ukraine and asked us if we could work out what the blue at the top represented and the yellow at the bottom. Michaela was really ???????????????????????????????insightful and said that she thought the blue was the sky and the yellow was flowers. Mika said that maybe the yellow was the sun; Vincent thought it could be a giraffe and Shelley thought that maybe it was the sand. The answer was sunflowers, so Michaela was nearly right. Ukraine’s national

flower is the sunflower and they have lots and lots of sunflowers growing in fields. They make sunflower oil from the sunflowers and the other thing that ??????????????????????the yellow symbolizes is wheat. Wheat is also a plant that you use to make flour

which then can become bread when it is ground into a powder. We learnt so many things this morning and had a lot of fun with Maryna being our teacher today, at this time. Another thing that we learnt was that there is ???????????????????????????????soooooo much snow in winter. In fact, the temperature is -25 and if it is windy it is even colder. Maryna said that you can make a snowman every day in winter because there is so much snow.

In Ukraine there is a museum of Easter Eggs and the building is actually shaped like an egg. The eggs are carved mostly out of wood and have beautiful colours and designs on them. They have a special musical instrument that is made out of wood and it is 4m long. William L said that he thinks it probably is very heavy and you have to be strong to hold it. The instrument is called “trembita”.??????????????????????

Some of us tried on Maryna’s head dress because we wanted to look as beautiful as she did. She demonstrated a traditional dance which you can see on the video that we attached with the email today. We learnt the different steps and danced to the music afterwards. We did this ???????????????????????????????while our Borscht was cooking. Maryna introduced us to a variety of vegetables that are used for cooking Borscht. She said that these vegetables are available all year round and they

last for a long time, so people make a variety of stews and soups using them. The vegetables that we used today were carrot, cabbage, beetroot, onion and potato. We cut them up carefully and then Maryna put them inside a pot with water and some miso to cook. It ???????????????????????????????was funny when we were cutting the beetroot, which is a vegetable that many of us have not eaten or seen before. When we were cutting it, our fingers became pink. When we cut other vegetables, our fingers don’t usually change colour.

We could smell the Borscht cooking while we were learning the dance and when we had finished learning the dance, we went to ??????????????????????wash our hands and get ready for snack. Our snack today was our regular snack that we brought from home as well as Borscht with a slice of wholemeal toast. For some of us the taste was so delicious, we wanted second and sometimes third helpings.

We want to say a huge “dyakuyu” to Maryna for coming ??????????????????????to teach us all about Ukraine. We hope that one day she will go back and visit her family there. We learnt how to count too – odin, dvar, tre, chotiri, pyat. It is not such an easy language to pronounce, and we will practice a bit more.

During the morning we also did some other activities. We sat with Shelley and pasted our shapes onto a piece of coloured paper ???????????????????????????????which we will then put into our workbooks/portfolios; we cut out leaves in red, yellow, green, brown and orange to decorate our page that has our leaf drawing documentation on it; we drew cars and traffic lights and we put some transport stickers onto our 3D neighbourhood pictures and documentation. Our ??????????????????????teachers put ribbon on our documentation about our weaving which we did last year. So you can see that it was a busy day in Petals Class.

Tomorrow we will welcome Goh who will cook with us and teach us about Chinese New Year. Thank for a really wonderful day today.

??????????????????????Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel??????????????????????

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