Pre-KG 2021/ 22 Blog 25
Celebrations and Food
Food is a big part of our daily life.
Every human being as well as animals and plants need food / nourishment.
Some people don’t think about food a lot while others have food constantly on their mind. The Pre-Kindergarten children are getting more and more aware about the importance of food and they enjoy their homemade bentos a lot. These are full of good nourishment and love !
This week was full of celebrations and highlighted the fact that certain food is eaten at certain occasions.
We started the week with the joyful event of Karneval where the Pre-Kindergarten children invited the children from K1 and K2 to dress up and celebrate together. After a long parade through the hallway with happy children and teachers in costumes, we assembled in the Pre-KG classroom aka rainbow room for dancing and candy catching.
Well, the “food” that is mostly associated with Karneval are candies, other sweets and traditional “Berliner”, round jam filled donuts which are so yummy. In the years when we have a whole school Karneval celebration, the PTA usually gets these Berliner order made at one of Kobe’s many bakeries.
A big thank you to Kai’s parents for buying the nice sweets and crackers for all of the EY children.
The children also made wonderful original Karneval masks with sparkles !
Please have a look at the video clips to experience the different Karneval varieties of north and south Germany.
And you can challenge yourself to dancing with your child to the fun Kindergarten Karneval song.
Das Erlebnis / Kölner Karneval
Then we had another wonderful celebration, this time from Japan. Every year on March 3rd Japan celebrates the girls or doll festival.
The festival dates back to the Heian period when girls were given a set of dolls, O-Hinasama, representing the emperor and empress and their court. Families prayed for their daughters’ health and happiness, hoping also that their daughters would become kind, strong and courteous.
At Pre-KG we started the celebration by listening to the traditional song and then the children eagerly set up a O-Hinasama display at the entrance for the whole school community to enjoy. The children did a great job putting pieces of flowered cloth as a base and making sure the dolls were placed nicely. A big thank you to the Pre-KG children for their contributions to make school a happy place.
The next day the children folded their own O-Hinasama dolls out of Origami paper. Each child chose their favourite colour and design for the emperor and empress’ clothes and crafted some colourful and cute dolls.
The children also had a lovely O-Hinasama party with the special sweets kindly provided by Tamaki’s mum and Emma’s mum. Thank you so much!
To let the children make another connection to the festival, we visited the Sheraton Hotel on Rokko Island to view their beautiful tiered set of O-Hinasama dolls!
Last not least, the children interviewed their sports teacher, Mrs.Miho who had celebrated her birthday last week in our class. We gave Mrs.Miho some handmade coasters. So what did Ms.Miho eat on her birthday at home ?
It turned out that she had a nourishing tofu nabe and a delicious cake ! A great way to celebrate your birthday , Mrs.Miho !
What a fantastic week of celebrations, food, lot of new discoveries and connections to different cultures !
We are all so excited to continue the learning journey next week during Culture Week.
Yours,
Anita Ursula Mönch
DSKI Pre-Kindergarten homeroom teacher
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