As a continuation of our Grocery Store Study, half of the class will begin visiting a local Japanese grocery store called Ten Ichi Mart & Deli next week. (The other half will visit the following week.)
Why visit Ten Ichi Mart & Deli?
Your children absolutely love listening to chapter books as they eat their lunch. So far, we’ve read three books from the Jasmine Toguchi series, which follows the adventures of a Japanese-American girl who navigates family, friendship, and cultural traditions. In one of our favorite books, Mochi Queen, Jasmine’s family gathers together at her house to make mochi in celebration of Lunar New Year, a tradition they follow every year.
Since Ten Ichi Mart & Deli is a five-minute walk from school, we figured it’d be a great opportunity for the Two Trains to not only contextualize some of what we read about in Mochi Queen, but also experience a different type of grocery store! These kiddos will be up for a big surprise when we tell them we’ll be purchasing mochi of our own to eat back at school!
Cheetah Grocery Highlights
-Helping to check out a customer from the White Room.
-Of course, the kids needed their own credit cards to go shopping. One even made his own Mastercard.
-After borrowing a calculator to scan our credit cards, someone declared, “Now we need a tapper!” Cashier has become a pretty coveted position.
-The kids also needed some name tags to make their work uniforms more official.
-To incorporate some simple addition, we labeled a few of the foods with stickers and gave the kids the chance to figure out how much their food would cost. But adding only two items seems too easy for the group at this point in the year! Maybe we should teach them how to use the calculator??
