Yummy Chinese Dumplings

This morning we saw the big world globe artwork on the table. We completed the blue ocean yesterday and noticed that the African continent had some green mosaic pieces already glued onto it. Today we added more of the green pieces to the artwork and completed the whole of the African continent and also started the Australian continent with yellow pieces too. Tomorrow we can choose a new color for Europe or Asia. On the second table we again added the marbled decoration to our Valentine’s Day gift boxes. The free art area was very popular this morning with many of us choosing to use the animal and vehicle stencils and stamps. The little stamps are a bit dry now and so Pooja gave us a nice big green ink pad to use with the rubber stamps. Soon it was time to clean the toys away as we had a special guest coming. Huijin very came to show us how to make Chinese dumplings and we then had a turn. We started off by helping the teachers cover the table with some brown paper called ‘Oven Paper’. We helped tape the paper to the table so that we could use the surface to make our Chinese dumplings. We made sure we had all washed our hands and needed to listen carefully to Huijin to make sure we made our dumplings correctly. Huijin showed us how to make 3 different shaped dumplings. First we took a dumpling ‘wrap’ and put some yummy mixture inside. The mixture was made with lots of different vegetables such as; pumpkin, sweet potato, carrots, onions, aubergine, kale, chives and zucchini. We then put some water with our fingers around the edge of the circular wrap and folded it over to make a semi-circle. The second kind we did the same but took the ends to make a crown shape and the third we made a little pouch like a treasure bag. This took us a little while but we made quite a lot. Huijin showed us how we should steam the dumplings to cook them and they took a little while so we did our second activity. We made a small monkey picture as it is the year of the monkey this year. We cut out the pieces to make a monkey picture and glued them to some colored paper. It was a great cutting and pasting exercise for us and we loved our new pictures which we took home today. After we had finished our snacks we each tried a Chinese Dumpling and they tasted very yummy. Thank you Huijin for your wonderful activity today! We had a great time in the park and when we returned it was time for our new phonemic sound. Today we were looking at the sound for ‘j’. We knew several of our friends whose names begin with this sound and also noticed that the teacher Pooja’s name also had a ‘j’ in it. We then played a jumping game where if the teachers said a word which started with ‘j’ then we should jump up and down, if the word started with a different sound then we should sit down. This was lots of fun. We looked at some cards with pictures and spotted: a jaguar, a jacket, some jewelry, a juggler, and a jet. We then moved to the table to practice writing this letter and made sure that the tail on the ‘j’ went to the left or it may look like a lower case ‘i’. Have a great afternoon and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow

All our love, Darren, Ayaka & Pooja