Snowflakes falling down
Tuesday 15th December, 2015
Today our Buds friends cooked “osechi” which is a soup that people eat in Japan during New Year. They put Chinese cabbage, carrots, fish cake and miso in the pot and cooked it during the morning. If you walked into Buds Class today, you would smell the sweet smell of cooking and you would have wanted to eat the soup too. Buds friends ate the soup at lunch time because they needed it to cool down during the day, as it was way too hot. They tore the cabbage leaves and put all of the vegetables in the pot. They said that a 
bunny rabbit eats carrots and so do horses; and some of us also eat carrots.
In fact, there was a whole lot of cooking happening in our Winter Wonders winter school programme today. All of us in Flowers and Petals Class cooked mochi in the oven. We set the timer and when the mochi was ready the bell went ‘ping”. We got so excited each time we heard the “ping” sound. When we took the mochi out of the oven, it was much bigger; it had become puffy and a bit translucent which means that it looks like there is some light inside it but you cannot see through it. We waited for our mochi to cool down and we set them aside so that we could eat them at snack time. We had some nori to eat together with the mochi and some kinako powder. Some of us loved licking the kinako powder, which is roasted soybean flour. It has an interesting smell too.
We made snowflakes using gold, silver or white origami. We folded the origami paper quite small; into a triangle shape. Then Hisami
drew some shapes for us to cut out and when we opened the origami paper, we were amazed to see such beautiful designs. Real snowflakes come in so many shapes. Researchers have never seen two snowflakes with the same shape, ever. “A single snow crystal consists of something like one quintillion molecules of water. The number of ways that many molecules can be arranged into six-sided crystals is astronomical. So the odds are huge that no two snowflakes have ever been exactly alike”. Our snowflakes are different for sure. We pasted our snowflakes onto a black background and tried to write our names using a white wax crayon. If you look at pictures of our snowflakes, you can see that none of them are the same.
We played Zingo at the table and some of our friends from Flowers Class signed their name on a piece of paper. Hana also signed her name and wrote her last name for the first time. Hisami changed the calendar
with us and we sang our “Hello” song. She played the piano and asked us what we wanted to sing. We sang “Twinkle, twinkle little star”. She also played music that us think of different feelings e.g . happy, sad, angry, sleepy etc. During the morning we listened to Christmas and Festive season songs which made us feel happy. Our favourite is the snowflake song……..”Snowflake, snowflake, little snowflake, little snowflake, falling from the sky………………………” Ayaka read us the same story that Santa Claus read to us when he made a surprise visit to our classes last week. We were a little surprised that our library had the same book as the one that he had…..maybe he left it in our library secretly as a gift.
Our Buds Class friends read two stories today. One was called “When Sophie gets angry – really, really angry” and the other one was “The Red Book” which has no words, just pictures; this makes us think more about the story that we have inside our heads , about the book. They talked about New Year in circle time and played with a Hagoita. They also went to play upstairs on the discovery deck and made a snowman using the white stones. While they were playing upstairs,
we went to the park to play. It was another fun day of Winter Wonders and we look forward to seeing you tomorrow.
We want to wish all of our friends and their families a fun afternoon staying warm somewhere.
Love always the children at Ohana Internati