Making ice creams

Every day we are settling more and more into our new school and our teachers had more time to relax at lunchtime today, than they had yesterday. Downstairs, we spent the morning playing in the classroom with puzzles and playdough. Lilian decorated her paper bag using markers and crayons and some of us made ice creams. Upstairs our friends are learning all about shopping and what we do when we go shopping; and in our own way, we are doing some of the things that they are doing in our classroom. They made obentos and other food items using paper so today we made ice creams. We used toilet rolls for the cones and then took some newspaper out of a bag and squeezed it into a ball. Most of them were already squeezed into balls so we wrapped our little hands around the paper and squeezed them a little more so that they looked like a scoop of ice cream. We chose a colour or flavor and then wrapped a piece of tissue paper around the newspaper. Our teachers attached the scoops of ice cream to the cones and wrote our names on them. Some of us chose two scoops for our ice creams. Many of us like the chocolate one which was brown; the purple one was blue berry; the red one was cherry; the white one was vanilla; the yellow one was banana or lemon and the pink one was strawberry. We stood them in a stand which Ayaka made from a tissue box. It had holes in it just like the stands that we see when we go and buy real ice creams.

The most fun that we had today was singing and dancing. After we had all packed away, we sat in the library and read books together with our friends and teachers. Some of us wanted to look at books by ourselves and some of us were happy to sit with our teachers and let them read to us. We read, Clifford the dog; Spot the dog; Moo, Baa, La la la and I spy. Then we packed our books away while our teachers sang to us and we started our morning circle time. We sang “Everybody clapping”; “ABC song” and then we sang our “Hello” song. Most of us who have been at Ohana International School this year remembered the words and we then all helped our new friends, sing their names.

We really love music and danced to “The monkey dance”; “Hot potato”; “Butterflies”; “Where is thumbkin”; “Shake your sillies out”; “Trees in the wind” and many more. We used musical instruments during music as well. Hana was smiling and dancing all the time.

Tokutaro and Lily put the shopkeepers outfits on as soon as they arrived. They added necklaces, helmets and handbags to the outfits and even a camera. When people came to their shop to buy things they added something really different to their shopping experiences and asked them to say “cheese” and they took photos of them as they finished their shopping. Beckett, Sean and Ava made onigiri for their obentos using white cardboard and black tissue paper.

We sang “Heads and Shoulders” in Japanese and changed the tempo and volume when we sang it a few times. We learnt left “hidari” and right, “migi” and sang a song that used these words in relation to different parts of our bodies. We sang the “hello” song in Japanese too, “onamae wa” and we read a book called “Owate usage no hanaya san”. It was a story about a rabbit that had a flower shop. He also was confused because in Japanese “hana” means flower and nose so was his shop a nose shop or a flower shop?

One of our activities this morning was making ice cream for our store. We wrapped tissue paper around a ball of newspaper which we squished earlier in the day. We used toilet roll tubes for the cones and tried to draw criss cross patterns on the toilet roll to make it really look like a cone; We put our ice cream scoops into the cones and used some of our home made money to buy them at the store. We said: “Chocolate kudasai” and when we received our ice creams, we said: “Arigatou”. We are having fun learning Japanese words and our friends who know much more Japanese than we do, are happy to help us. In the MPR, we used the slide, coloured balls and climbing wall. First however we each took a large sheet of newspaper and squished into a ball which we would use later in the morning for our ice creams. Thanks for another fun summer school day!

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