Baking challoth

It was a busy morning as Chana, Yossi’s mum came to bake challoth with us. Challoth are the special bread that Jewish people eat on a Friday night for the Sabbath. In the older class upstairs we learnt about why they have two challoth on a Friday night. Long ago when the Jewish people were walking through the desert they used to get manna from God which was their food. Because the Sabbath is a day of rest, and they cannot cook on this day, they collected two batches of manna on a Friday; one was for Friday and one was for Saturday.

The dough felt so beautiful when we were kneading it. We rolled the dough into long sausages and then curled it into a snail; or we rolled it into a few pieces and we plaited or braided it. The classroom downstairs smelt just like a bakery as they were baking our challoth until lunchtime. We all have one in our school bags to take home and share with our families. We want to say a big thank you to Chana and Yossi for coming to make the challoth with us today and for sharing this beautiful ritual with us.

 Downstairs we played with our friends and made a few more stars using coloured paddle pop sticks. Ava made hers using many different colours and then Tokutaro wanted to just use yellow ones and make an airplane. Ava also made an art work using some of the mono prints that we used on our large canvas. We had fun in our KIDFIT class as we had new equipment and we learnt some new things about our bodies. Today we learnt about our mouth and all the things inside our mouth. We have teeth, gums and a tongue inside our mouth and lips on the outside. We learnt that brushing our teeth is really important so that we do not get bacteria inside our teeth. It can be really painful if this happens and we can prevent it by eating healthy food, brushing our teeth, doing exercises and getting enough sleep. We used long yellow foam things that some people call noodles. These were our toothbrushes. We held them with a friend and brushed sideways, up and down as well as round and round. We know what healthy foods we should eat and in fact when we were having snack, we started to talk about foods that are “booboo” and foods that are “ping pong”. These expressions Jet our KIDFIT teacher taught us. The bad ones are “booboo” and the good ones are “ping pong”. We said that chocolate chips were “ping pong” but our teachers said that Jet would be sad if he heard us say this. We forgot that even though we like to eat chocolate, it is not good for you. We said that pretzels were “ping pong” and bananas were “ping pong”. Upstairs we spread out newspaper on the floor and laid our second canvas on the floor. We used a beautiful turquoise colour on our painting and instead of splattering the paint with a brush we trickled it on with a spoon so that we could make lines and drops. We looked for areas that had a lot of white and tried to put the colour on them.

 Just before our KIDFIT class we squeezed newspaper into balls so that we could use them for one of our activities. This activity was so much fun because Jet threw all of the balls on the ground and said that they were garbage and we had to pick them up and throw them back inside the basket. We used one mitten each and had to work with a partner and hold their hand that had a mitten on. We only had a mitten for our left hand so it was a little strange for us to hold hands. Usually we hold the opposite hand of our friends so that we are next to them. This time we were facing them, and it felt different. We had to go opposite ways and in fact almost all of our exercises were with partners. We used small tennis rackets and a soft yellow ball and had to hit sideways and forwards. We tried to hit low down so that we didn’t hit our friends. We took two small red bean bags in our hands and did arm exercises with them. We put our elbows together and moved our hands out and in; we put them out to the side and brought them together; we held them behind our heads and tried to strengthen our triceps and then we threw them in the air with alternate hands and tried to catch them. We received a worksheet from Jet at the end of our lesson that we can do at home. We had a great week and have now come to the end of December. Soon it will be holiday time with lots of twinkling lights, candles and special things for all of us.

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