Onigiri, onigiri choto tsumete

Today we were in Japan, making onigiri and learning how to count in Japanese, listening to a Japanese story and singing some songs. We also had a visitor whose name is Tamara and she is a teacher. She knew exactly how to play with us and do things with us and we loved having her with us in our classroom.

At the activity tables we had the Japanese flag, for us to colour in. We had red crayons and markers because in our page, there was a circle, right in the middle. On the Japanese flag, this circle is red in colour, while the rest of the flag is white. All we had to do was to try to make the circle red.

As soon as we arrived this morning, we saw the trough of water and toys inside. A few of us took off our clothes and wore smocks while playing and cleaning the toys. We love this activity and once again, are so happy that it was both fun and we were doing something for our teachers and our class.

Our sensory activity today focused on our sense of smell. We played with uncooked rice that was mixed with rosemary. We had fresh sprigs of rosemary to smell and add to the rice. Some of the rice grains were green and the rest were white. We scooped the rice with spoons and enjoyed both the tactile and olfactory experiences that we had with it.

The rosemary smelt really nice and Shelley said that our mums can put some rosemary into olive oil and it gives it a beautiful flavor. While some of us were completing our flags, and our friends were washing the toys, some of us started making our onigiri. For the onigiri we used rice, bonito, sugar, chopped up nori and soy sauce. We each had a portion of rice on a piece of plastic wrap, we decided what we wanted to put with the rice and then we closed the plastic wrap and did “nigi nigi” until we made the rice into an onigiri. Our shapes were mainly round while onigiri are usually triangular in shape. We ate our onigiri at snack time and they were delicious. Do you think we asked for a second helping? Yes, you are right, we did! But there were only enough onigiri for us to have one, plus we had our own snack before.

We forgot to mention that we also added ground sesame to our onigiri. We actually ground the onigiri all by ourselves. We used a pestle and mortar and we put sesame seeds inside and pushed down really hard, to make them into a powder. We added these to the onigiri and they gave them a delicious taste.

You can see from some of our photos that we had fun dressing up and we stayed in costume when we played games. Hisami played a matching game with us, where we had to uncover pictures that were the same. If there were different, we had to put the cover back on. When we selected two that matched, we kept the covers as our bounty. Our circle times were filled with stories and singing and counting. The story that Sayaka read was called “Obento Bako”. She combined reading the story with our song which we love singing at school. We counted in Japanese from one to ten; ichi, ni, san, shi, goh, roku, shichi, hatchi, kyu, jyu.

Our final activity for the day was one where we used our sense of touch, our sense of smell and our sense of taste. It was a jello painting activity.

Sayaka showed us the jello in a dish. The smell was so wonderful some of our teachers wanted to eat it. We started off with a spoonful in our hands which felt slimy, mushy and gooey and we then put it on the table, and ‘painted’ with it. We had two more colours and scents that we ‘painted’ with. One of our teachers said that they would love to “e, a, t” it and William, with his really good listening ears, said: “You can’t eat it, you just paint with it”. Shelley was amazed that her understood her spelling! She told us that most of the time, when we paint, we just use our hands or a brush or a roller. This time however we used our hands, but it was okay to taste the “paint”, because it was jello. Once we heard that we could taste it, some of us spent the time, scraping the mixture off the table and licking our fingers. It was such a great experience and we are looking forward to seeing what is in store for us tomorrow, on our final day of Ohana Chefs.

Sadly we all said goodbye to our friend Liam who is going back to live in Germany soon. Shelley and Darren have known him since he was a little baby when his sister Miya was at Ohana. We are all sad to say goodbye, and hope that one day, we will meet somewhere someday and remember the precious days when we were together as friends at Ohana International School.

Love Shelley, Ayaka, Hisami and Sayaka