Happy BIG birthday Jen and Happy "Otsukimi"
Firstly, we want to say a big “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” to Jen, in the office because today is her birthday and it is a big one. She has a four and a zero in her age now. We only have one number in our age but she has two numbers in her age.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY” Jen! We hope that you are having a great birthday and we look forward to celebrating with you……………………sorry we can’t tell you when!
Our morning started off with much preparation for cooking odango. We learnt that rice powder is made from rice so we thought that it would be a good idea to try to make the rice into powder by ourselves. Kai soaked sticky rice overnight which we drained this morning. We then put some inside a pestle and mortar and started to ground it ourselves. It was quite hard to grind it into fine powder by hand and we persevered for a long time. Kai brought along his food processor this morning so he took it out and we put all the rice inside and soon it was like powder in texture. The food processor made a loud sound as it whirred and spun; grinding, chopping and processing food. We didn’t use this rice powder for making odango, we used the odango powder that Hisami bought at the shop. We will use the rice powder that we made for something else. We mixed the odango powder with water and made it into dough. We then rolled the dough into balls and put them onto a tray. The dough was white so most of the balls were white but we made some balls yellow, using yellow powder which we added to the white dough. You may wonder why we made some of the balls yellow……….the reason is that tonight is the celebration “otsukimi” and it will be full moon. The yellow balls remind us of the moon when it is full. We hope that the clouds will disappear tonight and we will be able to see a clear sky with a full moon; and maybe even a rabbit pounding mochi on it!
When we had rolled all the dough into balls we used toothpicks and made miniature “yakitori” made out of odango. Usually yakitori are made from chicken or chicken balls or meat or spring onions or other savoury foods. Our “yakitori” were different and they were tiny. We put them inside a pot with boiling water so that they could cook and then we were ready to eat them. We could eat them either plain, or with kinako (soy bean powder) or azuki (red bean paste). Even though we ate all our snack and lunch we still had space to eat lots of odango today. We had some for dessert after lunch! Yummmm!
We enjoyed our music lesson with John and have a new song that he and Shelley made up for Halloween. It will be attached to the email that has this journal in it. We sang “Hello everybody”, “Hallo, hallo, hallo, hallo, Halloween”, and the “Ohana School Song”. He brought a drum with him and we tried to copy the rhythms that he played, by beating on the carpet; pretending that the floor was a drum. We moved our bodies when he played other instruments e. g. we took a small step when he played the bell and we took a big step when he played the drum. Then when he played the bell, we stood on one leg and when we played the drum we bent our knees. He played the “Crawl dad song” on the guitar and we clapped, swung our arms, jumped around, tip-toed, blew a kiss, hugged a friend and waved goodbye.
Yulia drew a picture of a rabbit with mochi on the moon so Hisami took a grapefruit, and pretended that it was the moon, and pasted Yulia’s picture on it. Haha…..we thought it looked like a rabbit on the moon pounding mochi!
We played a game with numbers on cards on the mat. We all were given a number and Shelley went through the numbers consecutively from one singing:
“Who has number one,
who has number one,
who has number one,
please put it on the mat”.
We did this all the way up to 20 and all of us had a turn. Then she asked us to find a number and place it inside the box.
Happy “otsukimi”. We hope that Griffin is feeling better and will be back at school tomorrow to see the colour mixing activity and play with us.
Love from all the Flowers Class children.