Bananas

After home schooling and lunch we settled down with a cup of chai and the girls were full of questions. We had been writing cheques in math class to practise the spelling of the numbers. So we had a big discussion on banking, direct deposit, post-dated cheques, withdrawals from different countries, and even loans and interest. Somehow we managed to get on a discussion about education as well. Yasmin wanted to know how much she needed. This led us to talking about different jobs and education levels. We even figured out that Uncle Dave went to school for twenty-two years, and Uncle Nassim went to school for twenty years!

After the girls had all their questions answered, they went off to play and Nadim and I tackled the kitchen. I’m not a clean freak, but the kitchen really needed cleaning. It has cream tiled walls and two rows of narrow, black marble shelves along the length of the walls. These shelves were sticky with grease and the tiles had some splashes on them. It took us an hour and a half, and we were able to finish two walls before we had to leave for English class at the school. The rest will wait for another time.

At the school, the kids were as eager as ever. We reviewed our discussion of the seasons and games we like to play and moved on to discussing food. They taught us about some new fruits and nuts that we hadn’t heard of before and we taught them some as well. We ended by teaching them a song about bananas. It’s kind of a chant where you say “Pick bananas, pick, pick, bananas. Pick bananas, pick, pick, bananas.” For each verse you change “pick” to “peel”, “slice”, “mash”, and “eat”, and you do an associated action for each verse. For the last one you use “go” and the action is to throw your arms in the air and go bananas! Of course the kids enjoyed that and we were singing it as we walked out the door.

The kids are from grades 3 to 8. There are about twenty of them and they are all girls. They are a spirited bunch, but not too rowdy. It’s so nice to see them full of smiles and happy to see us. It really makes my day.

CM