Chinese New Year.

The year of the Ox. Sue May and Jim lend me their beautiful lantern and banners

We made some noodles which were quite long to make, but the children enjoyed doing the activity and were looking forward for their lunch meal

(pasta sheets drying a bit befor we make noodles)

A bowl of dried food (chinese new year's custom) was served at snack time alongside with hemp crackers and cheese (Cow and soy) and fresh apples.

We told the story about how it came to be that each year is named after an animal

For lunch we had our nooddles with a drizzle of toasted sesame oil and soy sauce and agave syrup, nutritional yeast, which is a success for most of the children, peas (none for Juliette!) and omelette. For desert , chinese baby mandarins, sweet as honey and fortune cookies (maybe not the best idea...as some fortunes don't speak to children ...but they liked the taste of the cookies.
We ate with chopsticks and I constructed some giant chopsticks to tell a story about how the gods gave a lesson to the greedy people by serving them the best food with giant chopsticks. The poor folk, could not eat a morsel...while in another room some compassionate people were given the same food with the same chopsticks and managed very well, by feeding each others...Not sure they understood, but they will remember the giant chopsticks...

In the afternoon we painted Blue for the sky in which the dragon roams, yellow for the sun and red for its cave. The children could choose which color they wanted to use for their dragon.

Then did some coloring , each of their favorite animals
Dragon: Charlie and Keir
Rat: Louve
Hare: Marina and Kiona
Pig: Menna
Horse: Juliette


Tuesday: mixed herbs for tea



To the organic herbs I purchased, we added:
Mint leaves from the garden
Rosehips harvested in the Fall and apple peel from our apple drying session



Decorated our dragon which got beautiful shimmering coats and scales
The snack of popcorn served with a bit of organic melted butter and nutritional yeast was well received... (I just am puzzled how fast my big pail of Red Star nutritional yeast is going down!)


Made chinese almond cookies


Finished embrodery of dream pillow


Wednesday:


The energy was high but the girls settled coloring and cutting and the boys after having been wild horses for a while and threatened to go run further out in the snow outside, calmed down into building mood.

Laker joined me cutting the fruit and decorated it artistically in a flower shape...



Then while the Wednesdays children worked on decorating their dragons, Louve and Marina started making a file to store their drawings. Both are really busy drawing every day and since the story of Lao Lao cutting out a lot of paper...



After a lenghthy snack, Thomas and Leif went on dishes chores. First a little bit unwilling, but then they were knights responsible of a whole float of boats (the bowls)...and all of a sudden their interest sparked.


As I felt that the energy was building up again, I warned the children of a dragon hidden in the forest going to "circle time " kingdom and that we should be very quiet in order to not wake him up (since Anatole was working upstairs... they thought , he was the dragon, and showed a lot of respect). Never had such a quiet circle time with all the children joining in.

To finish Chinese New year, I pulled out the delightful story of Tikki-Tikki -Tembo- no -sa- rembo -chari -bari -ruchi -peperi- tembo.

Then finally they were let free outside and played with lots of enthusiasm for an hour while I was preparing a quick fix of Pita Pizzas which we were discussing the topping at snack time. We aggreed on : tomato sauce, pineapple, ham for the non vegetarian,and white cheese which would taste like orange cheese, or soy cheese for the vegetarian. Those were served with sunflower sprouts ( Hey, Laker loved them!) and carrot sticks.

The afternoon we finished baking the cookies and putting our dragon together.