Delicious vegetable soup

It was fantastic Friday today with cooking, completing our Xmas gifts, seeing our sleigh almost packed to its capacity ready for Santa, working, playing, listening and doing many new fun things with our friends and teachers. When we arrived at school we saw the same vegetables that we had bought at the supermarket yesterday, on the table. Together with them on the table, was a bowl, a hot plate and pot, some plastic knives, chopping boards and some vegetable cubes. We started off by chopping up the carrots, potatoes, pumpkin, and broccoli while Hisami chopped up the onion. She started to cry while she was chopping up the onion and Lilian went up to her and said: “Why are you crying? You are not a baby”. Hisami told us that she was crying because there is something inside the onion that makes you cry when you chop it up. When we were finished chopping up the vegetables, the last thing we needed to do was tear the leaves of the spinach and put them inside the pot as well. We added water to the pot and soon it was cooking. While it was cooking out teachers added the stock and we carried on doing out other activities, enjoying the smell of home cooked food, in our classroom.

These are some of the ingredients that we used. We spent a lot of time chopping them up and chatting while we worked. We love chatting to our teachers and friends and talk about many different subjects each and every day. Today we spoke about Santa and how many presents he can carry in his sack when he comes to pick them up on Monday morning. Lilian thought that he could carry a lot and we said that we would wait for him to come on Monday, and ask him. We have so many presents for Santa to take to the children in Minamisanriku-cho and are really excited that so many children will have smiles on their faces at Christmas time. Thanks to all of our families for bringing so many presents to school.

We will still be collecting on Monday so if anyone needs to bring in their gifts, they can.

So our cooking continued during our first morning circle. In this circle time, listened for our names and said ‘yes’ when our teachers called our name; after we had completed our roll call we counted how many children were in the class. Hisami then wanted us to understand the concepts of more or less so she used some Lego blocks to help us understand. We counted ten children in total today. Then we counted three boys and seven girls. When we placed the blocks on top of one another, we could see that there were more girls than boys. When we looked at the number of boys in comparison with the number of girls we worked out that there were four more girls. All of these things may seem challenging in the beginning but with concrete examples we are able to understand things really easily.

After our first circle time, we went to the park. We were going to go to the Bakery today but will go next week after we have baked our own cookies at school. Today we played a visual memory and tactile game. Shelley asked us about our different senses and what parts of our body we use for them e. g. eyes are for looking; what do we listen with? Etc. Then we spoke about what vegetables we had used in the soup and we remembered potatoes, spinach, broccoli, carrot, onion and pumpkin. So we took our container of pretend vegetables and looked for the same vegetables that we had used. We could find most of them but we

didn’t have pumpkin. There was a small plastic vegetable which we thought would be a good makeshift pumpkin. Michaela knew that it was not a pumpkin and tols us that it was an onion. We asked her if it was okay to pretend it was a pumpkin since we didn’t have one. Then we each had a turn to touch them and look at them. Then we put on a blindfold and we could no longer see them. The only way that we were going to know what they were was by touching them. We all played the game and all of us knew which vegetable we had found by feeling them.

Our story today was more of a discussion on a few new professions that we learnt about from looking at the books that Maryna brought to school for us. We learnt about an archaeologist who digs in the earth of old things; really old things like dinosaur bones or old buildings from 100’s or 1000’s of years ago; we learnt that a vet is a doctor for animals, an astronaut flies to the moon and has to wear a really heavy suit as there is no gravity on the moon. We saw pictures inside a spaceship where everything was floating around. Lilian thought it would be fun to go to the moon because she could do many more acrobatics and not fall and hurt herself. Michaela told us that a baseball player catches little balls; a person who works in a book shop orders the books and puts them on the shelf. There are so many different jobs that people can do; when it comes to choosing one day, we are going to be so confused!

We forgot to mention that we went to the glass studio to say thank you and give them a card that we had made.

We hope that William L had a great time in Hawaii; Taiyo is feeling better and were glad to have Luke back at school today. Wishing you all a great weekend!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel