Cupcakes with pumpkin seeds

We could not believe it when we looked out of the window to go outside to play in the park and we saw that it was raining. The weatherman said that only Tuesday would be raining this week. We hope that his prediction for good weather tomorrow will be correct and we will have a great day out digging for sweet potatoes. Our teachers have prepared big bags for tomorrow filled with necessities e.g. First Aid box, school T-shirts, wet ones etc.

So downstairs we spent the day indoors, playing with the toys on the carpet and doing activities with our friends. We welcomed a little girl called Harper and her mom Emily. They came to look at Ohana and see if they liked it as a school for Harper. She played with us and then she sat with us while we ate snack and ate her snack too.

Today we had something extra to eat for snack time. We made cupcakes. They were originally blueberry cupcakes but we added something to make them a little connected to the holiday, Halloween which is coming next week. We added pumpkin seeds. We baked them with Shelley and Goh san and helped mix the ingredients in a bowl. We poured the cupcake mixture into the bowl and all that we added was some milk and pumpkin seeds. We noticed that the pumpkin seeds were green and were a little surprised as the pumpkins that we played with today were orange. We played with small and medium sized pumpkins which we will decorate next week. We each took a pumpkin seed to taste but we didn’t put it in our mouths as Shelley did; however when we ate the cupcakes, we ate the pumpkin seeds as they were hidden inside.

     We watched the cupcakes in the oven and tried to smell them as they were baking. We used our noses to smell them; our eyes to look at them and our tongues to taste them. They were delicious. We made more than enough so that our teachers and friends could have some too.

Upstairs some of our friends made their fences for the farm animals and the rest of us played co-operatively with one another. When we play like this, our teachers feel really proud of us and they appreciate our kindness to and respect for one another. Some of us really enjoy sensory experiences and we spent a long time mixing the shredded paper and water with our hands. We love the feeling. In the library we read “Inside a barn in the country”. We remembered many animals from the story e.g. cow, pig, mouse, horse, owl, duck, cat and sheep. We then sang the Old Macdonald song and included all of these animals in the song. Ayaka then played a game with us where she named the animals in Japanese and we had to guess the names of the animals in English e.g. cow – ushi; dog – inu; horse – uma; pig – but’ta; sheep – hitsuji. We finished playing the game and then we noticed that our junk art animals are a lot bigger than the fences that we made for them. If they were real animals, they would be able to jump over them!

So we decided to make smaller animals to go together with the fences. We made them using art clay. We rolled the clay into a ball; first using both of our hands and then using one hand and the table below. We chose four matchsticks for the legs and pushed them into the clay being careful to see that the animal could balance on the legs. We found some small tops of pens and pushed these into the clay to make the head of the animals. We will wait for the animals to dry before adding things to them.

We went to the park and decided to water our flowers just in case there is no rain for the next few days. We have been missing our friends Margo and Jennifer as they have both been sick. We hope that they get better soon so we can play with them at school again. See you tomorrow for our trip to dig for sweet potatoes.

Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh, Liezel and Christine.