The rain cloud and cooking ice cream!

Has our ‘Rain Rain Go Away’ song turned away some of the rain clouds? How nice is it to be able to come to school without our rain gears and what is more, we get to go to the park! On our third day of our ‘How’s the Weather, Reporter’ week, we each started making a rain and cloud mobile and enjoyed cooking J Today, Luka was the first one to come up to Flowers class together with Nanako. Nanako is one of the teachers at Ohana and she is also Luka’s mommy. Our next friend was Miyu who came in with a beautiful loud voice saying, “Good morning!” It is always nice to greet our friends and teachers. At the big table, the teachers had set up some bubble wraps, a plate of grey paint, rollers and blue Poska markers. On one side of the table, we colored a sheet of bubble wrap in blue and later, we will cut out rain drop shapes out of it.

Gaby really liked this activity and she came back to do it twice. On the other side of the table, we painted another sheet of bubble wrap in grey then we flipped it over to stamp in on to a piece of A3 white paper. When we carefully lifted up the bubble wrap sheet, we could see patterns of grey polka dots all over the white paper. Let’s see which part of the cloud mobile this patterned paper will be used for. Taiyo had great fun tapping his hands over the bubble wrap sheet.

In our morning circle, by Gaby’s request, we sang our Hello song again. When we sang our ‘How’s the Weather Today’ song, we were not sure whether today is sunny or cloudy because we thought we saw both. Then our teacher called us over to go to a corner table to fill in My Weather Chart for today. After our snack we were busy trying to get ourselves ready for park time since we wanted to go to the park together with the Buds class! As we were heading to the park, we could all feel some rain drops falling but we kept walking hoping that the rain will not be heavy - John started to sing “♪Rain drops falling on my head♪,” then Maki joined and sang “♪Singing in the rain♪” – sometimes we forget how to enjoy a ‘bad weather’ but we were reminded of finding a simple joy even when we were getting a little bit wet. Moreover, we found a new friend at the park; it was long and slimy and wiggly. Yes, it was a big fat earth warm who had come out from the soil to say hello! While some of our friends and teachers were screaming with excitement and bit of fear, Gaby was being very gentle and protective of this new friend. It was hard for us all to say bye-bye when we had to leave the park and go back to school for our afternoon activity…

Back in the classroom, Nanako read a funny Swedish book translated into Japanese called, Kim no Fushigina Kasa no Tabi. The story was about a little girl called Kim who comes to a bread shop with her mother, one rainy day. While she was waiting for her mother outside, she jumps on to her umbrella and sets off on a strange adventure; she passes through a busy traffic, the woods, then a jungle and out into the ocean where she is hit by a storm and finds herself diving into the water, in through a hole that leads to a sewage system surrounded by dirty rats and finally comes out from a dam with her umbrella turning in to a parachute. After such an adventure all she wanted was to eat some snack as she finds her mother coming out from the bread shop.

Speaking of snack, Nanako asked if we wanted to make our own snack, something cold and yummy. We all guessed what the teachers had prepared the tables for, so we all answered, “Yes, ice-cream!” On the table, we each took turns to squeeze some lemon juice out in to a cup. While Maki was grating the skin off from the lemon, in one bowl we poured some yogurt, honey, and then added the lemon juice and grated lemon skin. In another bowl, we poured in some castor sugar and fresh cream. We each took turns to mix the two ingredients - we all tried so hard with the help of Liezel, Maki and Taiyo’s babysitter till it felt heavy in our hands. Our last job was to mix the first bowl with the second bowl and we poured the yogurt and cream mix in to a small paper cup. We then added some fresh blueberries and homemade blueberry jam into the same cup each with a popsicle stick with our names on. Since some of our friends cannot eat dairy products we hope to make dairy-free ice cream tomorrow so that we can all enjoy our ice candies on Friday!

The weather forecast tell us that two big typhoons are approaching and while we cross our fingers for a minimum damage to this country and other places, we will learn about storms and how lightening is caused.

Have a lovely afternoon!

All our love, Maki, Liezel, Goh, Bill and Nanako