G'day mate, welcome to Australia

Wednesday, February 25^th, 2015 We went to Australia today with Shelley. She used to live there before she came to Japan and she introduced us to a few things that she thought would be fun for us to know about. We started off looking at different animals in our animal box. We had a kangaroo, koala, dingo and crocodile. Some other animals that are typical to Australia are wombat, emu, echidna, and platypus. We then looked at a really large book that she had made with pictures of these animals in it and all about their babies, and habitats. The emu is a really large bird that lays huge blue eggs; a kangaroo carries its baby in its pouch and the baby is called a joey; koala’s live in eucalyptus trees and eat gum leaves as they are filled with water and are juicy. In fact all animals have something special that they do.

A wombat is a short animal with a short tail. They have very sharp front teeth and powerful claws. We read “Wombat Stew” which is a really funny story about a dingo that wants to cook a wombat and make wombat stew. The other animals were a little shocked when they came upon the dingo and his “billy can” (which is a pot in Australian slang) with a wombat inside. The animals suggested that the dingo add some things to make the stew more delicious; they were really tricking him. The animals that came along were an echidna, a platypus, an emu, a koala and a blue tongued lizard. At the end they suggested that before he put the wombat in, he taste the stew………aaaaaargh he screamed and ran off and luckily, the wombat’s life was saved.

We learnt about Aboriginal artists who paint using dots. They sometimes paint on bark but nowadays they use paper or canvas. We could choose between a kangaroo and a koala and used cotton buds for our dot painting on them.

When the Aboriginal people first started painting, they used to crush different coloured stone to make powder and they would then mix this with water. The colours that they originally used were mostly natural colours from the earth. Nowadays people use paint and have a wider selection of colours to paint with. When we had finished painting we went to wash our hands for snack time but we also washed our hands for cooking. After snack time, we were going to cook. Today we made toast in the toaster and then we spread some butter and vegemite which we mixed together, on the toast. The last thing that we did before we ate the toast was to bake the toast in the oven. We were so excited to eat the toast and were grateful to our teachers for tempering the taste and smell of the vegemite. Shelley said that they used to make rusks at her school in Cape Town as well as the one in Sydney, the very same way. We helped mix the butter and vegemite together to soften it and mix the two ingredients really well. We spread the mixture onto a piece of toast and really enjoyed eating it. It was so delicious. Koh chan said that he thought that his mum would like it!

We had fun in the park and enjoyed having time to play outside. We missed some of our friends today as they are sick or away and hope that they will be back tomorrow or next week.

Earlier in the morning some of us completed our “Hina dolls”. Thanks for a fun day of International Month. G’day mate!

Love always Shelley, Hisami and Liezel