Welkom na Suid Afrika

We missed our friend Taiyo the whole week and hope that he is now fully recovered and will return to school on Monday. We are also glad to know that Grace, who fell off her bicycle more than a week ago, is feeling a lot better. So maybe on Monday, we will see them both again.

Today downstairs, we travelled to South Africa where Shelley was born. When she told us that once upon a time she was a baby, some of us said “No!” Marc, said: “After you were a baby, you became big”, which was correct. We started off our day with a huge map of South Africa, drawn on six pieces of paper. The colours of the six pieces of paper were red, green, blue, white, black and yellow. Why do you think we used these six colours? We can tell you if you don’t know. The South African flag has all of these six colours on it.

 You can see on the map that there are many tiny pictures of things. To start off at the very bottom of the map, is a place called Cape Town, which is where Shelley was born. Yes, she was a baby, once a upon a time. In Cape Town, there are many amazing things and one of them is that the mountain looks like a table. It is therefore called Table Mountain. Just before Shelley left South Africa to go to live in Sydney, Australia, she climber Table Mountain. Most people take a cable car to get to the top of the mountain, however at that time, Shelley was young and sporty and she climbed the mountain like a rock rabbit. In and around Cape Town there are many beautiful beaches and more nature. She showed us photos of many animals that are famous in South Africa and you can go to a many different wild life parks to see them. We pasted pictures of these animals all over the map of South Africa. There were elephants, lions, leopards, wildebeest, baboons, eland, springbuck (these are one of the national emblems of South Africa, and there is a small one on the shirts of the South African rugby team), hippopotamus, rhinoceros, giraffe, ostrich, meerkat and more. There are always typical foods to every place in the world and in South Africa, there are many. We saw pictures of biltong which is dried meat, boerewors which is sausage that you “braai” or barbeque on a fire, zoo biscuits, chocolates, Chappies bubble gum, Ouma buttermilk rusks, koeksisters and melktert. We were wondering if the melktert that we baked this morning, would look like the one in the picture and it did.

  She was so worried when we were making the melktert together because she didn’t follow the recipe properly. She said: “This is the first time I have ever made one” because she was worried that it wouldn’t work out but………..yummmmmm, it was so delicious. If anyone of our mums would like the recipe, she will send it to you. It was made from milk (soymilk was used), sugar, flour, corn flour, eggs, cinnamon and vanilla. Our chefs today were Michaela, Lanah, Vincent, Tomas, Adrien, Iva and Zachary. They all helped pour the ingredients into the bowl, then we had to heat up the milk, then we had to make the white part of the egg into soft peaks. So the whole process took a while.

We had some melktert for dessert and as we mentioned before, it was really good. Shelley taught us how to count in Xhosa which is one of the many languages that people speak in South Africa.

1 – inyeh, 2 – mbini, 3 – ndato, 4 – zineh, 5 – ghlano, 6 – ndandato, 7 – xlexle, 8 – bozo, 9 – toba, 10 – lishoemi.

She then hummed two tunes to us to see if we could guess what the tunes were. The first one was “Baa, baa, black sheep” and the second one was “Happy birthday to you”. We first sang both of the tunes together in English and then she sang them for us in Xhosa. There were some words where you say them but sort of clicking your tongue. They are a bit difficult to pronounce.

   We named many of the animals on the map all by ourselves and used the pointer finger to show our friends where they were on the map. We had one more activity to do but the time ran away from us and we will all do it on Monday. We have a selection of shapes that make up the South African flag, which we can paste onto a piece of paper in whichever way we want to. Thanks Shelley for teaching us a little bit about the place where you were born.

Upstairs, we chose red, yellow and black for the walls of our castle and painted styrofoam with these colours today. Styrofoam has many holes in it and we tried to put the glue inside the holes to the best of our ability. Next week we will paint some more and then add all the walls to the gray towers which are already painted. We made flags for our mini wood styrofoam castles and could chose which colour we wanted to use for them. We had a selection of triangles and rectangles. We decorated the flags with markers and coloured pencils and then taped them to the flagpoles. When we looked at pictures of castles, we saw that the flags were usually right at the very top of the castle so we tried to put ours in the same place. We then put our castles onto fake grass and had photos taken of them.

   On the carpet we had a number of large boxes which became play castles and we had a fantastic time, getting inside them, wearing crowns and pretending that we were kings and queens. In fact Olivia was dressed up in full princess costume with a crown and Tokutaro, was in his regular clothes with a crown on his head. We used the boxes as tunnels, castle walls and towers. When Sean and Noa climbed inside their boxes, they never realised that they were both really deep and they had trouble getting out of them. Help! They were trapped in the dungeon! Our Kidfit class continued teaching us about muscles and during circle time, Ayaka read a book and did the actions to “Life of a Ninja”. It is a book about children learning to be “ninjas” and how they had to jump, hop, etc and do tricks. In the book that she read, there were some photos of Japanese castles which are completely different from European ones.

It is the end of another week and we hope that if you are free tomorrow you will come to see the taiko show at Yamano Hall in Yoyogi. Shelley and Ana, Tomas’s mum are playing as well as Tokutaro’s two brothers, Mantaro and Fukutaro and Lanah’s brother. You will maybe see more people that you recognise there. Have a wonderful weekend and see you on Monday.

Love always, Shelley, Darren, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Goh, Christine, Maryna, Sharee and Rama