Peeling carrots for our carrot juice

We have been learning all about the different types of fruits and vegetables we can use to make juice. We have made apple juice and lemon juice so far and our tamariki from that have given lots of suggestions about what we can make next.  With a big bag of carrots Deanne had brought at the supermarket, it was time to get juicing again.  We started by first washing our hands, then we had to peel the carrots.......

Peeling carrots can be tricky and we talked about how to hold the carrot and peeler safely and to peel away from our body.  It required a lot of concentration and co-ordination as both hands have a job to do. Well done everybody! I wonder what this juice will taste like?  I wonder what colour it is going to be? 

Apple Juice!

A visit from Andy at the local library!

When the phone rang, it was Andy from the Howick library asking if we would like a story time today?  Well, of course!!  We just love special visitors at Uxbridge!!  Andy has visited us before and we remember him from our Te Kakano trips.  He is a great story teller and once again he entertained us with stories, songs and bubbles - what fun!  Thanks Andy.

Two trees, how lucky are we!

With our Outdoor tree looking beautiful, it was time to set up one inside.  This one however was a new tree we had just brought, it came in a box with instructions and colour codes on all the branches!  What a puzzle!!  Lucky we had some great helpers to figure it out.  Piece by piece it came together!

Then for the decorations..... These have been individually made with our own special photo and we each found a special spot for it to hang on the tree.

Decorating our Christmas tree

With the anticipation of Christmas nearing, there was a lot of excitement as we pulled the tree out to decorate.  We found the perfect spot in our vege garden for it to go...... a little tinsel, some hanging balls and decorations, two guards on deck and a very important Santa Stop Here sign was carefully placed.  I wonder if he might come visit on party day?

Mt Olympus finally erupts!!

There has been much discussion over the weeks on how we were going to get Mt Olympus to erupt.  There were visions of smoke and fire for this amazing volcano but considering all the health and safety aspects we looked for alternative methods.  As we were reminded by our tamariki who are pretty expert in making volcano's we just needed Baking soda, vinegar and red dye!

Alrighty then, we are set - Lets do this!!

What can you do with paint, ping pong balls, straws, spoons and glitter?

You can do so many things with paint.  It is just wonderful stuff.

We put blobs of paint on a tray and then we tried to blow ping pong balls through it.  We got out of breath after all the blowing and the balls did not move!

Perhaps the paint was too thick.  We added water.  Success.  The balls raced through the paint and across our tray.

We added glitter and silver paint.  We used spoons to send the balls racing across.

And then, of course, some of us could not resist the urge to get our hands right in there as mixing tools.

Our Christmas Elf

We had a very special friend arrive at Uxbridge today...A Christmas Elf sent to us from Santa.

Elf told us that he is going to hide in a different place each day and that he can move around by himself at night time because he is a magic Elf..... He is going to keep out a watchful eye as he is one of Santa's special helpers.

He also brought a present with him.... an advent calendar for us to check each day. He told us he is going to put in special recipes, crafts, surprises and treats for us to enjoy over the coming weeks!! What a wonderful surprise...we cant wait to see what we get each day!

We have to give our special Elf a name and we had some suggestions put forward from the children....... (including Elfa, Fred, Troy, Buddy, David and Snowflake) so we will ask for more suggestions next week and pull one out of a hat!

Christmas Sand Saucers

It is Christmas tradition to decorate our houses with holly, mistletoe and evergreen boughs but at Uxbridge today we put our own spin on this. We made Christmas sand saucers with leaves, flowers and tinsel.

The Clevedon A&P Show!!

Our potato made it to the show for the great potato competition! We also entered some silver beet and a lettuce in the indoor section. While our potato was one among many and did not place in the competition our lettuce placed second in its class!

Here is our potato with the other potato's waiting to be judged, judging was on best looking plant, most interesting shape, heaviest potato and best yield. 

The judging begins

Our potato only had two potatoes on it - maybe next year we will have more. 

Here is Harland and his family at the show with our prize winning lettuce!!

Our Christmas Tree!!

Check it out!!!!!

Don't miss seeing our gorgeous Christmas tree displayed in the Howick Village.... It will be on display from Midnight madness (this Friday) and there throughout the Christmas period. 

Each and every child has decorated and contributed to this special group project so be sure to go and have a look and find your child's decoration! 

Lemons into lemonade

Dexter arrived at Kindy with a lemon.  He told us he wanted to make lemonade, so after getting a few more from the supermarket we pulled out the juicer and set about our task.  We first tried juicing them the old fashioned way, by cutting them in half and squeezing them by hand.  Because it was a hot afternoon and we had our juicer on hand, we put the rest through it.

We talked about the mechanics of the juicer, and the ways it was similar to our manual hand juicer, before watching it do all the work for us by separating the juice from the pulp and pushing the juice into the jug waiting underneath.

After our lemons were juiced, we added a couple of table spoons of sugar to balance the sourness, then some water before we were able to taste test.  It was unanimous - it was delicious! 

This experience stimulated lots of discussion about everyone's likes and dislikes in relation to food and drink.  Lots of suggestions were made about what we could juice next - Apples, pineapples, pears, oranges, mandarins and even bananas!

It was such a popular, fun and educational experience that we revisited it again the next day with apples.  This time it was A LOT more difficult to get any juice out of the apple with the hand juicer.  We talked about why that was, and tamariki shared their observations about the differences between apples and lemons.  We then set about putting our apples through the juicer.

 

Once juiced, we only needed to add water to the concentrated apple juice, as the apples are sweet enough on their own.  Once again, it was unanimous - Delicious!  Such a fun way to spend a summers day, learning about the properties of our food and how to make the juice that we are used to finding in our supermarkets.  We have reserved the pulp from the apples and look forward to making apple muffins one day soon.