Carving our pumpkin

Today was our Jack-o-lantern carving day. It took a lot of time and effort and now we have a proper Halloween Jack-o-lantern for our party.

We will explain to you what we did. First Hisami drew a line to indicate where we were going to cut. We first cut the top part of the pumpkin off so that we could get inside it……it is such an enormous pumpkin, Hisami, thought that it would be a challenge to cut it but actually it wasn’t. Vincent and Koh chan helped take the lid off and then the big job began…cleaning out the inside of the pumpkin. We scooped and scraped and scooped and scraped and then sorted the seeds from the pulp. You can see from these photos what a big job it was and we were so

curious about eventually eating the pumpkin seeds. What were they going to taste like? Once we had cleaned the seeds, we dried them in the microwave and then we roasted them in a pan with some salt. They were so delicious. Only a few of us wanted to try them and then at the very end of the day, Koh chan became daring and he ate a few and really liked them. While Shelley was cooking the seeds, we told Hisami where we think the eyes, nose and mouth of the Jack-o-lantern should be. She drew triangle eyes, a circle nose and a jiggly mouth with one tooth. We helped push the shapes out when she had completely cut them out. This is what our Jack-o-lantern looks like. We will let it dry over the next few days and put a candle inside to see what it looks like.

We actually finished carving our pumpkin, while our friends from Buds class came for their gymnastics lesson. They did their lesson in our class because we have less furniture to move and we think that we are stronger too…..we can move our furniture around easily and we know exactly where everything needs to go. We whispered our snack time song so that we wouldn’t distract them and also we thought that it was polite to let Tanaka sensei have the big voice, rather than us.

We did our warm up exercises which included stretching from side to side, from top to bottom and then walking like a bear, walking like a frog, walking like a bunny and a crocodile. Every week we do some things that are the same and Tanaka sensei adds new exercises too. Today we played a game called “Ninja”. When Tanaka sensei shouted tree, we stood like a tree with our feet together and hands at our sides; when he said floor, we lay down on the floor and when he shouted wall, we stood against the wall. In another game, when he shouted “kaminari” we had to hide our belly buttons and lie down on the floor on our tummies or we stood against the wall with our tummies touching it. In the “karasu” game, the story is that the karasu will eat our “oshiri” so when he shouted “karasu” we had to stand with our bottoms against the wall so that he couldn’t see them. In another game, he would say the vowel sounds from the Japanese alphabet; a, I, u, e, o…..and then he would say “okasan”…….he would trick us because we knew that the word that would chase us to sit on a cushion was “obake”……he would say “otosan” and then eventually he would say “obake” and we would run so fast to sit on a cushion. We would always laugh as it was a fun game but were also laughing because we were a little nervous of the “obake”.

The last game we played was walking on a cushion and saying 1, 2, 3, 4 in Japanese.

Phew, Monday is a great day, being back at school after the weekend and keeping fit with our friends and teachers.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.