Our swahili cooking and lots of other tasting and sounds

Today we went to Africa and cooked a Swahili meal called Ugali and Sukuma. We started off by preparing the kale, tomatoes and onion. We tore the kale into pieces chopped up the tomato and chopped the onion. Giorgia got tears when she was chopping up the onion while nothing happened when Daiki chopped up his onion. It was interesting to see that two people reacted differently to the same thing. Shelley said that when she chops up or slices onions, she also ‘cries’. When we had finished chopping up the vegetables, Sayaka sprinkled some salt on them and then she started to cook them. When they were cooked, we could smell the vegetables and we were curious as to what the combination of Ugali and Sukuma would taste like. Nanako used to eat Ugali and Sukuma with her nannies when she grew up in Kenya and Shelley used to eat something similar with her nannies on South Africa. The cornmeal mush has no taste but when eaten together with the tasty vegetables, the combination of textures is what makes the meal so interesting. As you can imagine, not many of us were keen to even try the Ugali and Sukuma. Luka ate it all up and even wanted a few more helpings. Maybe this was because Nanako is his mum and she liked it, since she was a little girl.

At the second activity table, we had whole wheat play dough which was a darker colour than usual and with it; we had a selection of seeds. We had sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and poppy seeds. Some of us started to eat the seeds and spent part of this time of day, nibbling on them like little birds. We especially enjoyed eating the pumpkin seeds. They were crunchy and delicious. The poppy seeds were a bit grainy and it felt like we had sand in our mouths while the sunflower seeds were also tasty. The texture of the play dough was beautiful and soft. Lucinda spent time cutting pieces of play dough and putting them inside a small see through container.

At the large activity table, we had threading using pipe cleaners and dyed pasta.

The pasta was red, yellow, green and blue green in colour. We threaded the pasta onto the pipe cleaners and made it into a bracelet for our parents. We enjoyed using the pasta as if they were beads.

Sayaka read us the story of the ‘Very hungry caterpillar’ and we looked at a real caterpillar inside Luka’s nature box. It was sitting on a piece of kale. While some of our friends were doing activities Hisami organized for us to have fun with water outside while washing our toys. We love water and combining it with cleaning was a great idea. We washed the Lego pieces, Ampaman toy, play dough equipment and some plates, cups and food from the dress up corner. We tend to put a lot of things in our mouths especially the plastic food which we know is not real. Our teachers hope that when we return from our summer vacation, we will stop putting things in our mouths!

Sayaka did an experiment with us using plastic bottles. There were five bottles with water inside them; each with a different amount of water. When we tapped the bottles with a metal spoon, they made different sounds. We all had a turn to tap them to see what sounds they made. We think that this is called a water bottle xylophone. We counted in Xhosa and Swahili and this is how you count in Swahili: moja, mbili, tatu, nne, tano, sita, saba, nane, tisa, kumi.

We are enjoying the interesting tastes from our Ohana Chefs experience as well as the sensory activities we are doing. Tomorrow we are going to Japan and will be making onigiri. We are looking forward to more fun with our teachers and friends tomorrow.

Love Shelley, Ayaka, Hisami and Sayaka