Handa’s Surprise

This week, our focus story was the classic ‘Handa’s Surprise’ by Eileen Browne which tells the tale of a girl called Handa who wants to surprise her friend, Akeyo, with 7 delicious fruits. She puts her fruit into a basket and sets off to Akeyo’s village, carrying the basket on her head. Can you remember why she carried the basket on her head?

Along the way, seven cheeky animals take the different fruits from Handa’s basket without her realising! You can rewatch the story in this video below. Can you remember what happens at the end? Why was Handa surprised to discover tangerines in her basket?

The story of Handa’s Surprise is set in a country called Kenya which is on the continent of Africa and, would you believe it, it’s the next stop on Granny’s world tour!

Kenya | Kenya, Africa, African map

image from https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/28991991326989290/

Even though, it felt like we were already in Kenya at the start of the week, as the temperatures in Nursery rose into the high 20s, we jumped back onto our magic carpet, buckled up and headed south, waving goodbye to the snowy Matterhorn and the grazing Swiss cows.

We entered ‘Masai Mara National Reserve’ into our Google Earth GPS and landed on a very different landscape to the one we had left behind! It was very flat, without any mountains and it looked very hot with only a little bit of shade under a tree here and there.

We used the little orange man to land safely and he guided us onto a very long, straight road. We set our compass to travel westwards and went along the road for a little while until, all of a sudden, we spotted something in the distance! As we got closer, we could make out some animals grazing by the side of the road. They had four legs, tails and black & white stripes! Can you remember what they were? That’s right – we came across a herd of zebras!

We quickly got to work, making our very own binoculars, so we could be sure to spot many of the other animals that are known to live in Kenya, such as lions, leopards, cheetahs and elephants!

While we were in Kenya, Miss Cronin also managed to find (most of) the fruits from Handa’s basket. Unfortunately, it was too tricky to track down any guavas, so we had to make do with a bottle of guava juice. Can you remember the names of the other six fruits?

We had a go at feeling, smelling and chopping up the different fruits. Then we blended all the pieces together to make a delicious smelling mixture. As it was so hot, we decided to make our mixture into ice lollies! We carefully poured the green liquid into ice lolly containers, added the sticks and popped them into the freezer.

Please note, as the chopping and preparation of the ice lollies was quite time consuming, only about half of the class had a go at this activity. As we knew the weather was going to change on Thursday, we made the decision to make enough ice lollies for everyone and those children who have not yet had a go chopping the fruit will do so next week.

By the time the ice lollies had frozen (mid-week), it was perfect weather for them and the general consensus was they were yummy!