Sweet potato pancakes
Halloween fever has gone and now we are into the month of November. There are so many things planned for the coming month and then it will be the end of the year. We still have some Halloween decorations up in our classrooms and downstairs we were cleaning the 
large pumpkin light and playing with the Halloween box. We will do orange and black collages tomorrow and put them into our workbooks/portfolios.
We had so many activities to do today. The first one was baking and we made sweet potato pancakes. We used sweet potatoes, soy milk and pancake mix. Some people call it hot cake mix. We cooked the sweet potatoes in the microwave with some water; then we mashed them until they were really soft. While we were mashing them we added soy milk so that they would become more of a liquid than a solid. We actually spoke about 
liquids while we were mashing and mixing. Shelley told us that a liquid is something that you drink and/or pour. She asked us all what we like to drink and told us that all of them were liquids. Ava liked apple juice; Clodia liked juice; Tokutaro liked juice; Eva liked milk; Lily liked orange juice; Goh liked wine and Shelley liked water. We mixed the sweet potatoes, milk and hot cake mix and then put some oil into a pan. We had to wait until the oil was hot and then our teachers spooned some of the mixture into the pan. We looked carefully for the bubbles as this is always a sign that you need to flip the pancakes. These pancakes were a little heavier than regular ones because they had sweet potato in them. Eva said: “The smell is delicious” and we were all waiting patiently for snack time so that we could eat them.
We made one huge tray which we shared with our friends upstairs and then we had another huge tray filled with some for us to eat. At snack time some of us had two because they were so delicious. Our teachers said that they were so delicious as well. Afterwards we sat together on the carpet and we had a story. Shelley told us a story about all of us sitting together waiting to listen to a story. This story had all the letters of the alphabet in them. In fact, it was a singing story and so she sang the song to us. It was called “A, you’re adorable”! She said that she thinks that some of our grandmas and grandpas may know the song.
Then we went back to the activity tables so that we could make our 3D sweet potatoes. We made them out of newspaper and tissue paper. We looked at a variety of sweet potatoes and saw that no two are alike. We squeezed the newspaper into a shape and then our teachers helped us cover them with tissue paper. They will add them to our Sweet
Potato Digging display at the entrance to our classroom.
During library time upstairs our teachers gave us a selection of animal books to look at. When we were finished reading our books, they asked us to talk a little about the animal that was the focus of our book. At the activity table, we started making individual art works connected to our sweet potato digging excursion last week. We looked at some vines and their colour and shape. We took some string and dipped it in brown paint and laid it on the paper. We pressed it onto the paper and then lifted it off several times. Over the next few days we will add things to our work in order to create a picture of what we saw and did that day.
During circle time, we spoke about comparisons and tried to make our circle, small, smaller and the smallest. We continued with this theme and compared the heights of our friends by looking at who is tall, who is taller and who is the tallest. We then looked at three of our friends’ faces and tried to work out who was happy, who was happier and who was the happiest. Ayaka read the book called “The Zoo” and when we saw a certainanimal we would make that animal noise.
We learnt a new song that goes like this:Oh if I were a farmer, a farmer, a farmer,
Oh if I were a farmer, what would I do?
I would milk the cows each morning, each morning, each morning
I would milk the cows each morning,
That’s what I would do.
We added verses with other animals and the things that they would do on a farm. Thanks for a fun busy day at school. 
Love always Shelley, Darren, Ayaka, Nanako, Sabine, Goh, Liezl and Christine.