Summer School

The boys were enrolled in a summer program through their school this week, not remedial reading or math like in the US schools, but Japanese cultural crafts.  What a great experience!  They actually do have Japanese culture and language classes during the regular school year, but this was a nice bonus during the summer where they got to make shi-sa dog puppets, exploding snake toys, origami, washi (like homemade paper) and other things.  The culmination was today when they had a cooking class - sushi!!!

The big kids prepared the cooked ingredients (Spam, sausage and rolled cooked egg - I admit, not very Japanese sounding, but bonafide ingredients in Japanese cooking)

while the little kids got to prepare the veggies (cucumber, lettuce, advocado and daikon sprouts) as well as a tuna/mayo spread and a salmon/mayo spread. 

They put all the ingredients on a big platter and then got to assemble their own sushi. 

Graduation ceremony!

Inspired by the origami they made in class, they decided they wanted to get some books out of the library to do more critters.  Alligators!  Frogs!  Scorpions!  That sounded great, until Cannon attempted to make a scorpion while I was putting the little ones down for a nap.  When I caught up with him, he was reading a book.  What happened to the origami?  He got to step 2 and then couldn't figure out what to do!  So I got sucked in.  Correction, he got to step two of the base fold (which numbered 16 steps), then there were 34 steps to the actual scorpion building!!!  I made it through the base fold and then step 13 of the scorpion before claiming that HE was the one with the 140 IQ so I was quite certain he could figure out the rest of the steps.  (In other words, my patience ran out!)  Sure enough, 20 minutes later he presented me with a scorpion!