Pre-Kindergarten 2021/22/23: Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 14 A Happy New Year 2023 ! Winter Celebration Food

Pre-KG 2022 / 23 Blog 14

A Happy New Year 2023 ! / Winter Celebration Food

A happy new year to all of you, may the year of the rabbit bring your families lots of good fortune, joy, love and health !

The Pre–Kindergarten children came back into class with big smiles on their faces, full of energy and with lots of stories.

And all of them have grown again !

Stephanie celebrated her 3rd birthday during vacation, so Happy birthday, dear Stephanie!

As our new unit focusses on animals as well as food, I had asked to parents to send me some pictures of the food and meals they shared as a family during the winter holidays.

The pictures proved a good provocation for inquiry and showed a great variety of winter celebration food representing the different nationalities and countries in our Pre-Kindergarten class.

Everything was featured including chicken with potatoes and other trimmings, juicy ham, Curry sausages, creamy gratin, yummy cookies, delicious Christmas cakes and of course the wonderful Japanese New Year’s food called O-Sechi which is presented elaborately in wooden boxes.

My own favourite seems to be fish, cooked, grilled, steamed or raw which I always find a pleasure to eat in Japan. I especially love the grilled sea bream which my friend makes for my family every New Year.

The Pre-Kindergarten children started right away to look at pictures of the delicious food and wanted to recreate it using our class bento boxes and toy food.

They made lots of different bentos and lunches, even for their dolls and acquired quite a bit of new vocabulary. Some food sounds better in the original language e.g. Ikura (Japanese red caviar) which translates into fish eggs in English or Fischeier in German.

We realized that we have a lot of toy food representing Western Cuisine in class, but that we were a little short on Japanese food items, so we went on a research walk to see where we could buy something to enrich our Pre-Kindergarten kitchen.

Luckily we found some nice wooden toy food at the local shop nearby and the children were very excited with their purchases.

Back at school the new food toys were put to good use and we finally had some shrimps and fish for making O-sechi ! The Pre-Kindergarten children gained a lot of new knowledge in the process.