A week of celebrating food and whānau

 

Last week we were lucky enough to have Janelle, Joel’s Mum, come and share her wonderful cooking skills with us. Janelle has a Chinese background and offered to teach us how to make delicious Chinese pork dumplings and fried noodles.

This was an experience that the children loved being a part of. They helped with the preparation of the vegetables for the noodles, chopping them into small pieces. Janelle then role modelled how to make the dumplings. This required lots of concentration and fine motor skills as the children carefully put a small amount of pork mince on rice paper and pinched it together.

 

 

 

It was lovely to see a lot of the children tasting the dumplings and noodles. Trying different types of foods opens up opportunities for our children to experience different cultures.

 

 

Thank you so much Janelle for sharing your skills with us and thank you to Risini for your help as well.

We love celebrating our families heritage and customs and especially love the many choices of food that is a part of this. We welcome with open arms anyone else who would like to share their cultural customs with us at Mairtown Kindergarten.

 

“Through experiences like these children develop an interest and pleasure in discovering an unfamiliar wider world where the people, images, objects, languages, sounds and smells are different from those at home" (Te Whariki).

Now, on the following day we had another celebration, a shared kai! All our families were invited to come to Kindergarten as we celebrated the beginning of term 4 and where we were able to welcome all our new families. We also welcome Izy who is student teacher with us for four weeks, and the return of Zair from her maternity leave.

 

Shared kai’s are something that the Mairtown Kindergarten team value greatly. They help foster our strong relationships with our families and build on our sense of community.  Our families have also the chance to get to know one another or have a quick catch up. The sharing of food is always a joyous occasion and is part of ‘OUR’ culture here at Mairtown.

 

                                                                     

“For many people, including Māori, kai is a very important part of culture because gathering, preparing and sharing kai shows hospitality and respect for visitors. It’s universally acknowledged that food, and the culture and customs around it, create a sense of community.”



Zair