Belgium Day!
It’s Friday! We had a really fun week and today was so fun too !
Our day in Petals started with the toy cars and we did car races! Everyone was going so fast we all won the race! We even had flying cars and cars that can transform into planes joining the race, it was so much fun! Nimo reminded us of yesterday's story with the crocodile who didn't want to share and we were all nice sharing crocodiles!
We also played with the costumes, we had lots of funny hats, dancer tutus and pieces of fabric you could do anything with, it's so much fun to change clothes and transform!
We sat down to finish our Petals Class passports, we all like to have our own passports, and we all wrote our name on it by ourselves, we were so happy! Sayaka took nice pictures of us with our new year lanterns, we were so happy we can finally take them home.
Then we sat down for circle time and Marjorie introduced us to a new friend from Belgium, it was Leo the baby lion! We were all very happy to meet Leo and he told us that he was Belgium's national animal! Then we looked at pictures of different animals and found out which country they were the national animals of. It was cool to discover that the eagle represents the USA and the tiger represents South Korea! we all also discovered the silly snow monkeys of Japan and the kangaroos of Australia, we also all shouted the panda's name together when we saw it and now we know that the panda represents China! Then Marjorie showed us a picture of an animal we didn't know, G thought it was a deer because it has long horns and then Theo thought it looked like a mountain goat, E also thought the same thing! They were not far from the truth because this animal is a cousin of the goat, it is a Markhor, what an interesting name! This animal is very cool with its twisted horns, and it is the animal that represents Pakistan!
Leo the little lion wanted us to discover the story of his daddy lion with a book that Marjorie read to us called “The Lion Inside” by Rachel Bright and Jim Field. It is the story of a little mouse who wants to make friends in the jungle and thinks that she is too small and that she must have a roar like the lion to make friends. Even though the Mouse is afraid of becoming the Lion’s lunch, she climbs the lion rock to ask the Lion to teach her how to roar. She realizes that the lion is afraid of mice and they end up becoming friends and they discovered how to roar with laughter together. We were scared for the mouse at first, but we all laughed because the lion is scared of mice, and we were glad that they are friends now and that the lion didn't eat the mouse as his lunch.
Speaking of lunch, Leo and Marjorie took the opportunity to discover a little more about Belgium by showing us its famous foods: waffles, French fries, chocolate and speculoos (in English we call it biscoffs)! E said it was yummy food and we agreed. T aid he wanted to eat waffles and G said he really liked eating french fries. Then we talked about our favourite foods:
R : Chocolate, blueberries and pizza!
J : Ice cream and sausage!
G: French fries!
J : Ice Cream!
K : Chocolate Ice cream!
C : Pancakes!
T : Chocolate cookie!
E : I prefer crepes!
We learned how to say itadakimasu in the Belgian languages which are French ‘BON APPETIT’ and Dutch ‘EET SMAKKELIJK’. Suddenly we noticed the ONI at our front door! Fortunately, we were prepared to throw beans and push them back with the Hiragi shouting, "ONI HA SOTO FUKU HA UCHI' we were stronger than the oni and hopefully they won’t come back in Petals class ! As Kazutoshi shouted ‘WE DID IT’!
We laughed a lot today with our new friend Leo the baby lion, and we are so proud to have scared the oni away, thank you very much for this fun Friday, have a nice weekend and see you on Monday!
Love Petals