(bright acoustic guitar music) - Hello, little learners.

Welcome back to our learning space.

My name is Mrs. Lara.

Can you tell me your name?

Thank you for telling me your name.

Greetings to you!

Good morning!

We have a lot to do today.

You'll remember, we started our art project at the end of yesterday's episode, so if you haven't checked that out, go back and watch because today, we're going to finish it, but before we get started with our letter and with our foundational skill, let's start with a song.

So I have Miss Maria here.

She's our mail person, see?

She carries our letters in her little bag.

And we're gonna sing together.

Here we go.

♪ Good morning, good morning ♪ ♪ It's a sunshine kind of day ♪ ♪ Come join Mrs. Lara ♪ ♪ For some learning and some play ♪ ♪ Will we sing a song ♪ ♪ Of course we will ♪ ♪ Make our brain strong ♪ ♪ Like super strong ♪ ♪ So come along ♪ ♪ Yes, come on, friends ♪ ♪ For some learning and some play ♪ All right, Miss Maria, let me put you away.

I'm so excited to share our mystery book with you today.

All week, we've been traveling to different countries and learning about their food and culture through the eyes of characters in books, and today, we have a very special character.

I'll give you one clue.

She wants to be a chef.

So I'm sure that we're gonna read about many delicious things to eat.

I'm already getting hungry.

So let's see if we get more clues from the letter that she delivered today.

Let's see.

(doorbell ringing) There's our doorbell.

Here we go.

Here's our letter.

And I always like to practice, remembering that we start on the left and go to the right.

So if you have a book in front of you, or if you see anything around you with letters like a poster, or maybe a newspaper, practice reading from the left to the right using your pointer finger.

Hello, pointer.

Here we go.

♪ This is the left ♪ ♪ This is the right ♪ ♪ When we read ♪ ♪ We start at the left ♪ ♪ And slide to the right ♪ Our letters always start the same way.

It says, dear Mrs. Lara, but it should say dear Miss Lara all of our friends at home.

I live in Canada.

Ooh, where's that?

I want you to take a look at a map.

Is Canada somewhere close to us or pretty far away?

My family is from Syria.

Now that's a place that is really far away.

You might've heard something about Syria lately with adults talking.

Let's see what she has to say.

I love to cook Syrian food with my family.

It is part of my culture.

I love to cook with my family, too.

It's part of my culture, like when it's around Christmas time, we all get together and make tamales.

Mine are always the really fat ones with not a lot of filling, but I still eat them.

Do you like to eat Syrian food?

Now, I was thinking if there was a place here in town that makes really good Syrian food, and I couldn't think of one, so if you know of any good dishes that I can try here locally, let me know, friends.

I wanna try some Syrian food because I've never eaten Syrian food before, but I can't wait to learn about our book character's experience.

So I have some clues that are gonna tell us about what's in our story.

Let's see if we can get some ideas for what we're going to read about.

The first one is a tissue box and it has some Kleenex in it.

I wonder if the character is going to have a cold, or sneeze, or if she's gonna cry.

I use these when I cry, too.

I hope she doesn't cry.

Next one is this.

It is olive oil.

You might see grown-ups using this to cook.

It smells very fragrant.

So if you have this in your pantry, it has double O's here, give it a smell.

Olive oil.

So I know there's cooking because I said she wants to be a chef, but this must be an important part of the story.

A bowl.

So maybe we're mixing something, or putting something in a bowl or pot to cook.

I wonder if we're gonna make a soup.

And then some crayons.

Ooh.

I wonder if the character's an artist.

I wonder if we're cooking the crayons.

No.

Crayon soup is not delicious.

I'm gonna put that back.

An onion.

Now, if you have an onion in your refrigerator, I want you to peel just one little piece of its skin off and see how thin it is.

Feel its texture.

It's so unique.

But an onion.

I know.

If we cut onions, that makes us cry.

I wonder if that's why we need the Kleenex.

And then the last thing is a map.

Now I asked you, do you think Canada is a place that's really close to us or pretty far away?

So I'll show you where we live.

So this is a map of The United States, and Fresno, which is our city, is about right here in the state of California.

This whole thing up here is Canada.

That's where our character lives, right above us, which might seem really close, but remember, this is just a picture.

Our Earth is round, so it's actually pretty far away from where we live.

You couldn't walk there.

So those are our clues.

Are you ready to read our mystery book?

Here it is.

(Mrs. Lara humming) "Salma the Syrian Chef", a story by Danny Ramadan, so the story was written by this author.

Illustrated by Anna Bron.

Now I like how they wrote illustrator here.

They said artist.

I think illustrators are artists.

And look, Salma, which is our character who wrote us the letter, she's holding a mixing bowl and there's a lot of people around her, some that look like her and some that don't.

I wonder if she's gonna be cooking for them.

Let's find out.

Here we go.

"Salma the Syrian Chef".

Salma watches the Vancouver rain from her apartment window in the Welcome Center.

It's different than the sunny days back in Syria.

She still can't pronounce Vancouver, which is in Canada, but her friends tell her that her ways of saying it are more fun.

So look, there she is, and we know that she's living in Canada at a Welcome Center.

Salma asks her mother, "What are you making?"

But mama is making dinner.

Salma rolls her arms when she says Vandourar, but mama won't look up from her English homework.

"Vancouver."

Salma finally says the words correctly, but mama doesn't notice.

She's busy calling papa back in Syria.

Papa will join them in Canada soon.

Salma's heart aches like a tiny fire in her chest.

when she thinks of papa.

She wonders if mama's heart is burning, too.

Mama used to giggle with her friends in the refugee camp.

It sounded like the ringing bells on the older boys' bikes.

Now after a long day of job interviews and English classes, mama barely smiles when tucking Salma in.

So so far we know that Salma and her mother are new to Canada and they live in a Welcome Center and it doesn't sound like mama's doing very good, though.

Not smiling much.

Maybe if Salma can make mama laugh, Vancouver will feel a little more like home.

Salma draws mama a clown balancing on a ball on top of an elephant.

She tells mama a knock-knock joke about bananas and oranges that she learned in language school.

I wonder if Miss Hammock goes to that language school.

She always has good jokes.

She even hides behind the fridge.

She jumps out and screamed boom, but all she gets is mama's sad smile, full of love, but empty of joy.

"I wanna make mama laugh."

Salma rushes into the playroom and almost crashes into Nancy's chair.

"She's been sad for such a long time!"

"When was the last time you saw mama happy?"

asked Nancy in her broken Arabic.

Salma imagines a waterfall of mamas, many sad faces since they left Syria.

"How about you draw a picture?"

Nancy says.

"Drawing helps me when I forget my good memories."

Salma looks at the colorful crayons, her memories of mama's smile shine like a beautiful rainbow over that waterfall.

So that's where the crayons are.

So it sounds like Salma has a problem.

She wants to make mama happy and she's trying to figure out how.

Salma draws her home back in Damascus, a yellow house with a garden surrounding it like a necklace.

The garden had a tree with green leaves and a bird's nest with three little eggs.

She colors the living room walls purple.

"Where the walls really purple?"

Nancy asked.

"No," Salma says, "but it's okay to add new colors to my own memories."

She draws papa at the table.

Mama carries a freshly made dish of foul shami, a big smile on her face.

Salma can't bring papa here sooner.

She can't rebuild their old home, but suddenly, she knows what to do.

Look at her expression.

That's the expression I get when I get an idea and go aha.

"I think mama misses Syrian food!"

Salma tells Nancy and the other kids.

"I wanna make her foul shami."

"I miss kushari," Iman says.

Salma tastes the salty, spicy Egyptian dish on her tongue.

"I miss the way my mama made masala dosa back in India," Ria adds.

Even Ivan misses arepas.

He just arrived from Venezuela, but none of them have ever heard of foul shami and Salma doesn't know how to make it.

"Do you know how to make foul shami," Salma asked Jad, the Jordanian translator who taught her the English names of the flowers in the community garden.

"No, but I can find a recipe for you," Jad says.

His fingers move swiftly on the keyboard.

Then Salma hears the printer ticking.

Jad hands Salma a paper with Arabic words.

"I can do this," she whispers.

Then she realizes she doesn't know the English names of any of the vegetables.

Poor Salma.

That's where the crayons come in.

Look, she's coloring.

Salma reads the Arabic words.

She's scared of looking silly in this new place where hardly anyone knows her language.

The smell of crayon on her hand reminds her, "I can draw the vegetables."

That's true!

Whenever you can't write, just like if you're learning to write, you can draw.

That's a form of communication, too.

Yellow for lemon, green for parsley, brown for peas, and red for onions.

And this is chickpeas, and that's garlic, and that's a bottle of olive oil.

Soon, she has all the drawing she needs.

Aisha walked Salma to the supermarket so she doesn't have to cross the street alone.

Let's see.

"Shukran."

Salma thanks Aisha as they wait for the traffic to stop.

So there they are walking together to the supermarket.

Back at the Welcome Center, Salma organizes her vegetables on the kitchen table.

"My mama won't be laughing at all if I use a knife," Salma tells Amir and Malik, who came together from Lebanon.

"Can you help me chop these vegetables?"

And that's true, when you're cooking, you shouldn't really use a knife.

She'll leave that to the grown-ups.

She blushes when Malik kisses away Amir's onion tears.

That was in our clue.

Someone was gonna cry and use the Kleenex.

You might see a grown-up cry when they chop onions.

Then, Salma realizes she forgot the spices.

"Mama likes sumac with her foul shami."

Salma looks through the spice rack.

"Paprika is daddy's favorite spice and mama loves cardamon in her coffee.

Pepper makes her sneeze, but she can't find sumac."

Tears fill her eyes.

"This is the worst idea ever!

It's too hard to cook Syrian food here."

Salma's fingers shake, the spices get blurry, and their smells mix together.

"Everything is ruined!"

Look at her face.

She's very angry and the people around her are very sad.

She thinks it's all ruined.

Then, Salma feels a warm hand on her shoulder.

It's Granny Donya.

"I hear you're looking for sumac.

I miss Persian cooking, too" Granny says, handing Salma a tiny red jar.

"Family dinners back in Iran always made me happy."

"I'm mad that we have to leave home," Salma insists.

"I can't find sumac or speak Arabic to everyone I know."

"But just look at those beautiful flowers on the blossoming trees," Granny Donya points out the window.

"This home might be different from everything we know, but it's beautiful in its own ways."

Salma sprinkles Granny Donya's sumac into the foul shami.

"It is beautiful," she agrees.

"One final step."

Salma holds the olive oil bottle over the bowl, but it slips out of her hand and crashes to the floor!

Crash!

Amir and Malik help her clean up the glass, but they have no olive oil for her to use.

Salma used all her money on the other groceries, so she can't buy more.

She sits on the floor and cries.

She's not having a good day.

You might know about that.

I certainly do.

Salma feels useless like an umbrella in a country with no rain.

She hides her teary face when Nancy walks by.

Nancy stops beside her.

"What's wrong?"

"Everything," Salma says.

"All I wanted to do was make mama laugh and look at the mess I made!"

"What I see is a dish made with love," Nancy whispers.

"I don't think it's missing a thing."

When mama comes home that night, Salma blocks her way into the apartment.

"Don't be mad."

"What happened?"

says mama.

Salma opens the door.

"I couldn't find olive oil on the table.

A bowl of foul shami awaits you."

"You made this for me?"

mama says.

Before Salma can answer, the door opens again.

"We brought olive oil," Nancy says.

Salma jumps in excitement and then mama breaks into a long, sweet laugh, like the echo of bells.

The end.

I know that was a little bit of a longer story, boys and girls, but it's a beautiful story about how food really does bring people together.

You might be in a place that's different from where you grew up.

If you kind of share your culture and the things that you love to do, you might see that you have more friends in our community than you think.

Now we have just a little bit of time, so I'm just going to do a quick foundational skill lesson for you and we'll move on to our art project.

Remember, I told you it was gonna take three days to finish, so we're just gonna start it today.

But here is our skill lesson.

We're gonna focus on beginning sounds, which is the first sound that you hear in a word.

So let's look.

We have a shopping bag and we need to put things in the shopping bag.

Let's put something that starts with this letter.

Big line down, little curve.

What letter is that?

The letter P. It makes a puh sound.

Let me take a look.

What starts with P?

Is it lemon or is it peas?

The name of the vegetable is the letter.

It's peas.

Let's put that up here in the shopping bag.

Oh, look it.

There's an eraser here thanks to Ms. Gina and then we're gonna find something that starts with another letter.

How about, there's two things that start with this letter.

Big curve, little line, and little line across.

The letter G. Let's find those two things and move on to our project.

Let's see.

It's G for guh, garlic.

That's right.

The G makes the guh sound, so we're gonna put garlic in there.

And let's find one more thing.

How 'bout this one?

Do you know what that is?

It's garbanzo beans.

Guh, guh, garbanzo starts with a G, so let's put it in there.

Look at all the things we have in our shopping bag, garbanzo, peas, and garlic.

There we go.

Now it's time to move on to our Project Place.

We're gonna start kind of drawing our fruits, so if you wanna follow along, get some crayons or oil pastels out.

Here we go, walking over.

For this, you're gonna need some simple supplies.

A sheet of white paper and oil pastels or some crayons, whatever you'd like to use, and of course, your imagination.

We're going to be making some fruit like in our story.

So the first fruit I would like to make is a banana.

Can you think about what a banana looks like?

Do you have a banana in front of you?

I'm gonna try to make it here.

It has kind of like a curve and then it's attached, almost looks like a crescent moon.

And it's not really pointy at the edges, is it?

It's kind of round.

I'm going to very gently color in my banana.

Now is a banana yellow?

Yes, it is yellow, but doesn't it have different colors in it?

Usually when I bring a banana home, it's not all yellow.

Maybe there's some green or maybe there's some browns, so I might add a little bit of brown because I want a ripe banana.

I'm gonna put some brown at the edge here, maybe here where it was cut off, and maybe in here.

We get that.

There's my banana.

You can kind of blend the colors together.

What other fruit shall I make?

How about an apple?

What color is an apple?

That's right, it's red.

Now you can make your fruit anywhere you'd like.

I'm gonna do one here.

Now, an apple, if you take a look, is kind of round, looks a little tomatoish.

It's a little bit lower here and I can kind of fix that there because I know I'm gonna be coloring it in.

And then it has a stem part.

I'm gonna color in.

Look how vibrant these oil pastels are.

And you can also use crayons, like I said.

I just kind of borrowed these and thought I would share them with you.

So there's our apple.

Making an oval shape, coloring it in.

And then what's missing?

Oh, a stem.

Let's do that.

We have our brown stem up here.

If you make this, you can make any fruit that is your favorite.

For me, I like to eat apples and bananas.

I think that's a famous song.

We should look it up.

Apples, bananas, what else should we make?

There was an orange in our story from yesterday, so we're gonna make an orange.

Now for that, you're going to need the shape that's kind of a circle.

And an orange kind of has little dots all over it.

Again, make whatever fruit that you have handy.

I'm using my imagination and my memory to make it.

Now, Suzanne and other artists who were impressionists, they actually had a still life in front of them of different fruits that they wanted to make, but I thought I'll just show you how to do it from your imagination 'cause you might not have different fruits like this in your home, but you can certainly remember and bring them up in your head.

So here's an orange.

A different one.

What other fruit shall we make?

How about a pear?

Maybe that'll be our last fruit we make today before we say goodbye.

What does a pear look like?

I know it's kind of round, then it goes on top like this.

I think I made the perfect pear!

So I'm gonna kind of put that in.

Now, an important thing that I learned in school that they might start teaching you is your coloring skills.

Now, I always liked to color outside the lines, but then, I don't know, I got to school and they said something that kind of made sense.

There's times to color outside the lines, you know, when you want it to be more abstract and you can't tell what something is, but there's also times when you want just the color to stay in the shape that you've made.

So I use both, color outside the lines and make the shape.

Next, we're going to cut them out because of course, we have to add them to our basket that we made yesterday.

So, grab your scissors.

And you have to be safe.

Do we cut our hair with our scissors?

No.

That's happened to me in the classroom.

Somebody gave themself a haircut.

That was a tough conversation with the parent.

Your child is bald now.

(Mrs. Lara giggling) I'm cutting out my pear.

Yeah, we don't cut anything but what the teacher tells us to in school.

And a stem.

There's our first fruit, a pear.

We're gonna save that.

Let's cut out our banana.

What fruits have you made?

Maybe you made different ones.

Grapes would've been a fun one.

Now I have a question.

Do you think grapes are really purple?

When you're in school, you're told if you have to sort fruits, grapes always go in the purple pile, but did you know that you can argue with your teacher about it because guess what?

Not all grapes are purple.

They might actually be green, I've seen some very, very light, almost red grapes, and I guess there's some deeper reds that kind of look like purple, huh?

Got some very deep purple ones.

Now I'm gonna cut out my apple, cutting out the leaf.

There we are.

Cut around.

I stay in the lines when I'm cutting.

I almost cut off the stem.

See, you might make that mistake, too.

Nothing a little glue can't fix.

And cut it up.

There we go.

Now tomorrow, for the last step in our art project, we're gonna compile our fruit basket and make a background.

So here is our basket and we're gonna add our fruit to it just like that.

So if you wanna follow along, bring some glue, your fruit, your basket, and your crayons or watercolors, whatever it is you wanna make your background out of.

It looks like it's almost time for us to go.

I wanted to leave you with one book recommendation before I give you a smooch.

Now yesterday, I told you that we read "Crafts of Many Cultures" to continue.

Today's book recommendation is "Round is a Tortilla: a Book of Shapes".

So you can use this to continue on with the learning at home.

All right, boys and girls, Mrs. Lara sends you a big smooch and a big squeeze.

We'll see you tomorrow.

Goodbye!

(upbeat acoustic guitar music)