Jambo from Kenya

Jambo! Today we travelled to a country called Kenya in Africa, where Nanako grew up. We cooked a special plate called Ugali and Sukuma. Nanako used to enjoy the company of her babysitters and maids and this is the plate that they shared with her for lunch when she was our age. The taste of the sweet cornmeal flour mixed with boiling water and the bitter kale cooked with tomato and onion brings her back to the land of Africa.  In the morning, we enjoying the interesting texture of our new play dough made of whole wheat. The whole wheat created a rougher but softer texture different from that of white flour from the basil play dough that we explored on Monday and Tuesday. We also sprinkled three kinds of seeds into the play dough - sunflower, pumpkin and poppy seeds – and pretended to make cookies, cupcakes, bread and ginger bread men. On the same table, we threaded colored pasta through pipe cleaners to make bracelets and necklaces for ourselves and for our mommies and daddies! For today’s flag, we used four colors – black, red, green and white. The black represents the people of Kenya; the red is the blood shed during the fight for independence; the green is the country’s landscape and the white lines in-between symbolize peace and honesty. For circle time, we talked about the third sense, hearing. We each had a turn shaking the five containers and guessed what was in the containers from the sounds they made. Ava, Taylor and Jessica guessed rice and they were right! Jennifer, Jeremy and Kosei guessed coffee beans and again they were right! Arata and Lilian guessed pasta but Taylor suggested they could be corns and luckily they were! We still have two more to go…As we were talking about sounds we decided it would be fun to make instruments with the things we can find in our kitchen. We had a choice of glass bottles, yogurt cups, cans, and thread rolls. Then we each chose what to put inside to make our own sounds – rice, red beans and soy beans. Arata chose yogurt cups with red beans, Taylor chose the thread rolls with rice, Lilian chose yogurt cups with rice, Ava and Jennifer chose the cans with red beans, Kosei, Jeremey and Jessica chose glass bottles with soy beans. Later we used these instruments as we sang the Jambo song which we sang over and over again to the park and back and even when we were cooking because it is such a jolly song! In Kenya, people speak many different dialects or languages and the two most common are English and Swahili. In fact many of our friends were already familiar with a Swahili phrase, “Hakuna Mata” from the Disney film Lion King and this mean, “no worries.” When Nanako asked our friends what they think of when they hear the word, “Africa,” Jennifer answered “green” and Kosei answered “animals.” Nanako showed us pictures she took in Kenya of the different animals living in the Savannah – there were lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos and ostriches. We then counted from one to ten in Swahili using the African animals in the classroom: moja, mbili, tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa and kumi. We also read a story called Greedy Zebra about how a zebra got his stripes. The story goes like this: long time ago all the animals were all grey and dull when once day appeared a cave after a thunderstorm with horns, threads and cloths in all different colors. However he was too greedy eating the grass when all the other animals were busy putting horns, tails and beautiful coats from the cave so that by the time he reached the cave, there was nothing left in the cave and all he had was strips of black cloths which he stitched together and squeezed himself into it when suddenly ‘POP, POP, POP’ it popped open showing his chubby tummy, until this day… Asante Sana! All our Love, Nanako and Darren