Cooking "ozoni"

Wednesday, January 21^st, 2015 This morning when we arrived at school, it was so cold because it was raining and there was some light snow falling from the sky. We couldn’t wait to get inside our classroom so that we could be warm and see what we were going to do today; and we were very happy to see Liezel and know that she is better. On the really big table was a large pot, some plates, knives, a bowl full of vegetables and some kamaboko.

In our circle before lunch time, Hisami showed us and explained in detail, how to make “ozoni”, just like the one that we made this morning. This time, we looked at all of the ingredients and she also had some pictures of the vegetables that we used e. g. carrot – ninjin, soy sauce – shoyu, cabbage – hakusai, rice cake – mochi, minced fish – kamaboko and fish soup – dashi. We looked at the bottle of some brown liquid which was soy sauce. When we were making the “ozoni” this morning, we spoke about other liquids that we know e. g. milk, water and orange juice. “Dashi” is a liquid but first you have powder and you add water to it to make “dashi”. We pretended to make the “ozoni” by adding all of the ingredients; some of which were pretend. We had drawings of “hakusai, ninjin, kamaboko, dashi and shoyu” which we put inside a pretend pot and then cooked. We clapped while we were waiting for the “ozoni” to cook in the pot. We counted while we were clapping. We counted from one to ten in Japanese, English, Spanish and then Giorgia counted from one to five in Italian. At snack time, we ate the “ozoni” and loved it. Some of us had a few helpings and because we had so much left over, we ate some more at lunch time. We were really full at the end of the day and had a lovely siesta.

You can see us cutting up the vegetables in some of the photos as well as eating the “ozoni”. Yummmmmm! Hisami is a really good cook at school, we are not sure if she does much cooking at home! Shelley keeps on telling her that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach so she must cook more. She was smiling because she was happy that we all enjoyed her cooking. Even Maryna and Christina came to have some soup on this cold day. Our classroom smelt of mummy’s home cooking which made us feel really warm and happy inside.

We completed drawing some pictures for the birthday cards and then we did a colour mixing activity with special clay. We used only four colours viz. red, blue, yellow and white. In order to create the colour that you want to, you have to look at the chart, choose the colour and then see what colours you need to make the new colour. There was a plastic container with different sized rounded shapes on it. In order to make the colour of our choice, we had to fill the rounded shapes with specific colours, shown on the chart. Then we scooped the clay out and mixed the colours together. This activity was great for strengthening the muscles in our fingers as we had to push and push and squeeze until the colours were mixed together properly. We made some amazing colours. Some of us chose to make many colours according to the chart and you can see from the photo, the various shades that we created.

We will order more for our class so that we can mix colours and make the muscles in our fingers stronger. The fingers that we used for squeezing and pushing are the same ones that we use when we hold a crayon, pencil or marker.

During the morning we played with the trains and Lego and in between, we had circle times. We did some exercises using the circular shaped cushions. We stood on them, and then stood on the floor. We did this in a pattern too. We counted one, two and stood on the cushion and then we counted one, two and stood on the floor. We did this over and over and then we went faster and faster. We jumped on the buttons on the carpet and then hopped on them too.

Because today is Wednesday, we read “Wacky Wednesday” again. We love to listen to the story and see all the crazy things that are going on in the illustrations.

When we sat together to change the calendar, we did something new together with the things that we know already. Shelley laid all the words spelling the days of the week, out on the floor. When she did this, there was a space between Monday and Wednesday. We worked out that Tuesday was missing; because it was on the board from yesterday. Koh chan got the word for us and then Shelley took one of our big books and covered almost all of the letters of the words. She just left three letters at the end of each word that were the same? We recognized that they were “d, a, y” and we learnt that as a word, it reads ‘day’. At the end of each day of the week is the word ‘day’ and in fact when we looked at all of the words on our calendar, we saw the word ‘today’ and it too had the word ‘day in it. Without singing our song, to help us, we knew that today was Wednesday. We had to change the calendar a lot today because it was snowing when we came to school and then it rained so our calendar says that today was snowy and rainy. We counted seven children today because Taiyo and Luka are sick. We hope that they get better soon and can come back to school and play with us.

We read an alphabet book that is extremely unusual. We remembered when we were outside on the Discovery Deck area yesterday; we saw the light shining through the different coloured transparencies. Well, this book has a green and a red transparency but what is more, they are not ordinary as they make things look different when you look through them. When you looked through the red you saw one thing and when you looked through the green, you saw something else. We loved looking at the pictures and seeing what was hidden under the colours. There was a CD too which we listened to for a while. In the book you can see the words written in English and in Japanese.

Thanks for keeping us warm today with the delicious “ozoni”. It looks like we will be inside again tomorrow……what will await us when we get to school? Hmmmm!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel