Our visit to the bakery and more

We had a fun excursion to the Bakery in our neighbourhood today. We will explain to you all the things that we did today and then you will see how the day flowed for us. We started off working at the activity tables with a few areas where we worked. At one of the activity tables we made Christmas/Festive Seasons cards for our families. We used the shape of a Christmas Tree and put stickers on it and we wrote our names. Hisami helped those of us who are still learning how to write our names and the rest of us wrote them by ourselves. We pasted a poem that Shelley wrote, onto the opposite side if the tree. We hope that our families like what we made for them for Christmas and we wish them a beautiful Festive Season filled with good cheer, joy and love. The second activity was hammering on a cork board with nails and shapes. On each shape there is a tiny hole where the nail goes. Once you have placed the nail into the hole, you take the hammer and hammer the shape securely into the cork board. Some of us just hammered and some of us made designs with the shapes. When we were finished we had fun pushing the nails out into the small containers and putting the shapes back on the tray. We will do this activity again tomorrow.

The third activity was with the light table and different coloured sheet of transparencies together with the plastic people who do different jobs and “who we meet on the street each day”. When we sat in our circle time today, Shelley asked us: “What am I doing?” We looked at the action that she was doing carefully and said words like sleeping, eating, thinking, listening, smelling, touching, reading, drawing, painting etc. When she first sat down she was hiding something underneath her top. She told us that since we all had babies during free play, she decided that she would also have a baby. We were wondering all the time during our circle time, what was underneath her top. Then she gave us many clues and told us that she is one of the people in the neighbourhood, that she works in a store and she wears white clothes and a white puffy hat. She told us that she makes dough and then bakes it into bread, cakes, muffins, cookies, sandwiches etc. Lilian and Lucinda both said: “Chef”. She said she was a kind of a chef but she specialized in baked goods and then Lucinda said: “Baker”. So out from underneath her top came her ‘baby’ and it was a baker. We played some singing games where we thought about what a baker does; we poured flour into a bowl; we added in eggs, milk and some sugar; we mixed and stirred; we poured the mixture into a baking tray and put it in the oven. This was all leading up to our visit to the bakery on the Azabu Juban Shotengai.

And here we are, at the bakery. We walked along the road from school and looked at the “takyubin”. Was this the bakery? No. We walked on and came to another place. This was a dance studio and definitely not a bakery. We then saw a convenient store but too was not a bakery and nor was the curry shop. Where was the bakery? As we turned the corner we walked past a Real Estate agent and ……there it was; the bakery. We looked in the window and saw sandwiches and bread and so many different things. We went inside the door and there were not many people around so we could look carefully at everything and even smell some things. We saw plain, chocolate chip and chocolate cup cakes; we saw sandwiches with ham and salad; some with salmon and salad; some with egg and many

different shaped baked things. We saw some loaves of bread and small rolls. We also saw cake with strawberries and cream and we were amazed that one shop can have so many things for people to eat. There were even drinks on one of the shelves. Shelley bought a loaf of corn bread for us and we helped pay the lady with coins and off we went on our way to the park. All along the way we chatted and of course, looked forward to tasting the corn bread. When we got to the park, we all sat at the picnic bench and tasted it, and we wanted more but there was only enough for us to each have one piece. And since we had just eaten our snack, we were not really hungry. It was delicious. We enjoyed our visit to the bakery and were surprised when another person that we meet in the neighbourhood, came to our classroom at the end of the day. It was the “takyubin”. They came to pick up the boxes of toys that Santa Claus could not carry the other day. Now all of our gifts are on their way to Minamisanriku-cho. We hope the children like the ones that we sent them.

We got some lovely new plants from the ward office and spent some time when we were in the park, planting them. They were pretty colours and we were able to choose what colour we wanted to plant, and Darren helped us. We also did some fun things with our friends on the equipment, as you can see from the photos.

Lilian said that she loved being a monkey on the climbing frame and Lucinda was very creative with sand and leaves, in the sandbox. She told her teachers that she made onigiri.

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel