Vegetable skeletons and mikan pumpkins

Today was a day of cooking. Yesterday it was a day of taiko and today we were a little more sedate and sat and cooked and prepared food for Halloween.

When we arrived, our large activity table was filled with vegetables, plates, plastic knives, platters and more. Hisami showed us a picture of a skeleton made out of vegetables. This is what we were going to make today. We wondered how we were going to make it however before long, we had cut the vegetables and were looking at the picture and the laying the vegetables out on a platter. In the photograph, the head is actually a bowl of dip however we replaced it with a piece of daikon or Japanese radish.

We had a wonderful time, looking at the picture and trying to match the different vegetables so that we could make the pelvis, shoulder bones, spine, arms, legs, ribs etc. We adapted things slightly from the picture and used our own imagination and creativity to end up with our skeletons. We will eat them tomorrow at our Halloween party with our mums and families.

We used a red pepper, button mushrooms, celery, cucumber, daikon, and baby carrots to make ours. We made a boy and a girl skeleton but our teachers said they think that a skeleton is the same for boys and girls. We used button mushrooms for the pelvis, cucumbers for the spine, daikon and celery for the legs, carrots for the arms, red pepper for the rib cage and celery leaves for the hair. Skeletons usually do not have hair but we gave our skeletons hair for fun.

We had quite a bit of left over vegetables so we made a salad and ate the salad for snack and lunch time.

While we were making our vegetable skeleton, Shelley was preparing something for baking. We were going to bake Brazilian/Portuguese cheese rolls called “pao de queijo”. We poured the mixture into a bowl and added two eggs and some water. Then it became a dough just like play dough, so we made it into balls and rolled them in our hands to make them round. We made our “pao de queijo” with a difference and added dried blueberries for eyes, a nose and a mouth. Our “pao de queijo” became Jack-o-lantern faces. We put them into the oven and watched the clock carefully. We enjoyed the beautiful baking smell that filled our

classroom today; and what’s more, we loved eating our “pao de queijo”. Some of us even asked for more. So our day was a baking day and an eating day too!

During the morning, we changed our calendar to Thursday and of course, we luckily didn’t have to change the weather because it was another sunny day.

We read a book called “10 Trick or Treaters”. Ten people dressed in fancy dress costumes went around their neighbourhood, trick or treating but they had no idea who they would meet along the way. Each time they knocked on a door, one of them ran away until there were none left.

We had a special visit from our Flower Class friends and teachers. They came to give us a present for our Halloween party. It is a “piñata” and it looked like a Jack-o-lantern. We didn’t know what a “piñata” was so Flowers Class explained to us that we need to hit it with something and then when it is broken, lots of treats will come out and we can all have some. This is going to be a fun part of our Halloween party tomorrow and we will do it just before we have our Pot Luck snack party. We were so happy to receive this gift from them and then………we gave them each a gift that we had made, to say “thank you”. Do you remember last week we made bat necklaces out of origami; well these were gifts for Flowers Class and we added a sticker and a tattoo to each pack. We think that they were very happy with our gifts.

The last thing that we made for our Halloween party was mikan pumpkins. You may be thinking “how can a mikan be a pumpkin?” Well, it can! You peel the skin off and try to get the white threads off too and then in the middle, you push in either a piece of cucumber or celery for the stalk. Tomorrow we will make ghost bananas when we come to school. We are so excited for everything tomorrow and look forward to having Lucinda back to join us, since she has been sick the entire week.

In this picture, you can see some of us looking out of a window. Well, we went upstairs to show Maryna our vegetable skeleton and saw a man doing something on the balcony. So of course, being the curious people that we are, we wanted to watch him. He was pouring something onto the ground and then he moved it around, using a scraper. We are looking forward to being able to play on the balcony when Watanabe san is finished building the deck and artificial grass area.

Thanks for a wonderful Halloween preparation day at school.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel.