Santa brought the kids their very own hiking tents. So we thought we would test them out with a short but steep 6km 1 night hike up Gheerulla Bluff to Thilba Thalba remote bush camp, which forms part of the Sunshine Coast Great Walk 

Kids have been on quite a few extended hikes now carrying packs, including Hinchinbrook Island earlier this year.  But while they have been little people, we have had a really light 4 man hiking tent to enable the 4 of us to do these hiking trips, and distributed the weight of all our gear and food so that the kids only had to carry about 5kgs each, gradually increasing it as they got older.  This is the first time that they have had their very own tent to carry, so they were pretty keen this time to carry all their own gear, clothes, food and water!

They packed their own packs, didn’t weigh each item (like we did for a maths activity when we packed for Hinchinbrook), just used their common sense and spatial awareness learned from previous hiking adventures. Their packs ended up being about 8kg each.

Kids also pitched their tents, and pulled them down to pack into their packs themselves.

The Walk is a grueling climb, but awesome views at the top, and a nice lookout at the camp area to have cuppas 🙂

Great little, but still challenging hike for the kids’ next level of hiking 🙂

They won’t need to carry their tents on our Himalayan Trek, but all the little training adventures add another layer of experience and fitness  🙂

So now Lucas’s turn…$100 cash for 5 days worth of meals, breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for the whole family 🙂 Click on the link for full details of the challenge.

His menu plan nice and healthy and tasty, and costs calculated from Woolworths website

His list for stuff he has to buy, and stuff already in our cupboard he needs to pay proportionately for.

Just like his sister, he made a video of his shopping trip. He’s made lots of animation videos before, but this was his first time chopping and editing video footage in iMovie.

He’s only 11, but I totally stepped back giving no help in his menu planning, budget calculations or shopping list.  I thought that he would make a few mistakes, to learn from of course, but he walked me through his plans and calculations and they were meticulous.  He spent $80.50 at the checkout, owed me $8.40 for items that we already had in the fridge/cupboard, and was reimbursed $10 for proportions of food that he did not need in his shop.  He’s planned a pumpkin soup that will do 2 dinners, making a new Persian dish but substituting the lamb for cheaper chicken, making his own chicken stock for his chicken and corn soup, and made changes during his shop to take advantage of the specials.  He ended up with $21.10 change that he gets to keep…as long as we don’t need anymore food for the 5 days.  I am really impressed and looking forward to his dinners….I already know he is a good cook and will deliver on his plan…

Will post a review on both of their challenges at the end of the week 🙂

Preparing for our Annapurna adventure and recording all our learning from it is helping the kids learn how they can achieve their own goals.

Undoubtedly ‘money’ is a necessity if your goals are adventures like going to Nepal to hike around a mountain!

Kids have been working hard to save money for the gear we need to hike safely in Nepal, and have already saved over $500!

But we will also have to think about a daily budget for meals and accommodation while we are on our trek….to make this trip affordable for us we must set a daily limit.

Kids have both really enjoyed watching the ABC series ‘Teenage Boss‘ with Eddie Wu, where kids get to manage the family’s budget for a month.  So they set their own little challenge:

Planning and managing our meals/snacks for the whole family from a Monday to Friday, with $100 budget.

Aurora’s challenge:  Mon 10th Dec to Fri 14th Dec
Lucas’s challenge:    Mon 17th Dec to Fri 21st Dec.

Challenge guidelines :

• Plan breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for 5 days (Mon -Fri), with $100 budget.
• Shop for the food for the 5 days’ meals.
• Manage the food allocation to all family members, including cooking dinners, allocating lunches etc for the 5 days.
• If food that we already had in the fridge/cupboard was used, the cost of the item will need to be added to the expenditure.
• If spices/condiments used, then a proportion of the cost added eg. spoonful of curry powder might be 20 cents…as it is impossible to buy new condiments for all meals within the weekly budget.
• Kids get to keep any money left over!

Here is Aurora’s menu plan, she figured even on a budget she could make the food desirable and healthy, catering for everyone’s diet needs,  lots of veg, and a little treat of an After Eight Dinner mint each at the end of the day:

Here is her shopping list, she looked on the Woolworth’s website for the cost of each item, so that she could estimate the cost and ensure that she didn’t go over budget:

Aurora was given $100 cash, and off she went to the shops (with Lucas helping her).  Her shopping bill was $61.80.  She calculated that she was going to use $16 worth of food we already had in the cupboard.  So she came well under budget…and has $22.20 as a buffer over the week in case she underestimated the amount of food we need 🙂 …or gets to keep it if we don’t need anymore food!

She also edited this little video of the shop trip, ‘Teenage Boss’ style:

Awesome job up to now, but how will she go over the week with the food that she has bought???? Will we starve? We will have to wait till Friday to find out….

In the meantime, Aurora came home from a track session at 6.30pm Mon evening and got straight into making our dinner, then prepared Dad’s lunch for him to take to work…I think she has this better than Mum 🙂

We have been learning some Nepali words and phrases over the last few weeks, and are now starting to learn the Devanagari script and Nepali Alphabet 🙂 So kids have been making prayer flags, they thought it would be a nice way to paint the symbols on and hang in our classroom for daily practice 🙂

This activity is not just about the Nepali Alphabet though, ‘how to do’ the activity and the freedom to get things wrong are what make the activity meaningful.  In a school environment, a teacher may only have 50 mins class time to run such an activity. So the teacher has to have all logistics worked out, everything measured, cut, prepared in piles, resources ready etc.  The kids are given instructions and they just follow.  Stepping back and letting the kids work out the logistics takes time, some may say is a waste of ‘learning’ time, but it’s where all the learning takes place 🙂

We first had to think of a way to make prayer flags. After searching many odd bits of material around the house and estimating cost of buying blank prayer flags, we found an old whitish sheet in the cupboard. Then came a Math problem.  What size should our prayer flags be to ensure we had around 100, enough for Nepali alphabet and some spares for fun wishes.  They measured length and width of sheet, 138 and 110 cm.  Lucas remembered on his maths online he had done something by adding all the lengths and widths together, and maybe that would help him figure out our problem.  He went onto his maths online program and found that would give him the perimeter.  He then looked some more, and recapped the lesson he’d done multiplying length and width, remembering that would give him the area.  He calculated 15,180cm square.   We needed 100 squares, how would we work out the area of each square, though? Lucas shouted ‘divide the area by 100!’ I was impressed 🙂  So they worked out each square needed a rounded down area of 150square cm to ensure we got 100 flags. But how long should each flag be???

Here is the full video we used :

As well as using the ‘concept’ of the prayer flag as a beautiful way to decorate our classroom and learn the Nepali alphabet, we also thought we would paint some with our personal hopes and wishes for our world, to blow into the wind.  Aurora painted symbols to spread her wishes of love, balance, strength, nature and peace.

Australian Curriculum Links

Yr 5/6 Visual Art : Explain how visual arts conventions communicate meaning by comparing artworks from different social, cultural and historical contexts – analysing how symbolic meaning or metaphor is constructed in students’ own artworks and artworks of others.

Math

yr 5 Calculate perimeter and area of rectangles using familiar metric units

Use estimation and rounding to check the reasonableness of answers to calculations

Solve problems involving multiplication of large numbers by one- or two-digit numbers using efficient mental, written strategies and appropriate digital technologies

Use efficient mental and written strategies and apply appropriate digital technologies to solve problem

yr 5/6 Design Technology

Investigate characteristics and properties of a range of materials, systems, components, tools and equipment and evaluate the impact of their use

Critique needs or opportunities for designing, and investigate materials, components, tools, equipment and processes to achieve intended designed solutions

Select appropriate materials, components, tools, equipment and techniques and apply safe procedures to make designed solutions

LOTE (Hindi as no Nepali in Aust Curr) : Convey information about aspects of language and culture in formats to suit different audiences and contexts / Creating and comparing their own examples of particular text genres, such as horoscopes, prayers or weather forecasts explaining their choice of particular language or text organisation  

HASS YR 7 describing how harmonious relationships with the natural world were reflected in Indian belief systems (for example, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism) (this is very limiting as all outcomes are…but you can work out the connection :-))

We have been slowly building on our family extended hiking gear over the last couple of years, for doing our hikes round Wilson’s Prom, Tiger Leaping Gorge, and Hinchinbrook Island, so we thought we wouldn’t need much more….

We havn’t done an actual pack list yet for Nepal…not got to that stage yet…but while we are doing all our reading and information gathering, we are realising that we are going to need a fair amount of ‘gear’ that we still don’t have, or really have the money for…

I saw on a local group a call out for leaflet and local newspaper droppers needed…so we got thinking…we need to train with packs on, we need extra cash for our gear…and it’s a job we can do safely together, so it seemed a no brainer to give it a go and sign the kids up for their first real job!

Signing up for this job has given the kids a real sense of responsibility, and a sense that they are contributing financially towards our family goal.  They are serving the community (we had no idea how many people look forward to their catalogues each week and thank us!).  They’ve been able to use the job as a meaningful way to apply their math learning.

Aurora has created a spreadsheet that calculates how much we earn.

The first leaflet pays $20 per 1000.  Every leaflet in the delivery after that pays $10.90 per 1000.  Aurora had to think of how to work out how much we would get paid depending on the amount of leaflets and number of houses in the area we were delivering.  Then create a formula in a spreadsheet, so that we could easily enter the number of leaflets and houses we have each week to calculate our pay, and keep a running total of the weekly earnings.

Lucas created a wall chart for us to have a visual running total of our earnings each week.

We decided that the kids were doing such a good job, that they could both receive 10% of each weeks earnings towards their own personal savings.  10% will also be going to a charity or organization in Nepal that helps kids somehow. So the next task is to make the spreadsheet visually appealing, plus include the deduction of their 10% and our 10% donation, and a separate weekly total of those. Then there’s working out how we can get things like wind and rain proof hiking pants each, cheaply, with the savings we have 🙂 So much Math!

The job has also opened up discussions about doing a job that does not align with personal values.  We have a ‘no junk mail’ sticker on our letter box, and we don’t consume much other than food, basic hygiene stuff, books, and hiking gear 🙂 We’ve been a bit anti- consumer catalogues!

We’ve talked about how many people would read/ bin the leaflets, is it a waste of energy on the earth to produce them, what does the companies’ involved market research say? Is it an ethical job? What about all the other jobs involved from producing the leaflets, to marketers?  What other jobs contribute to environmental, physical and mental health problems? There were actually lots of regular jobs we could think of!!!

It’s the kids’ first job, we are now part of the process, in order to save up  things we need for our goal.  We live in a world where we have to work to live.  Is it possible to have a job that aligns with all ethical values?  Deep topics, but the kids have plenty of thoughts to contribute to them!

Australian Curriculum Outcomes

Yr 7 HASS Economics and Business – Knowledge and Understanding : Investigating the contribution that work can make to an individual (  example, earning an income, contributing to an individual’s self-esteem, contributing to the community, material and non-material living standards and happiness)

From the senior secondary curriculum : calculate weekly or monthly wage from an annual salary, wages from an hourly rate including situations involving overtime and other allowances and earnings based on commission or piecework (ACMGM002)

use a spreadsheet to display examples of the above computations when multiple or repeated computations are required; for example, preparing a wage-sheet displaying the weekly earnings of workers in a fast food store where hours of employment and hourly rates of pay may differ, preparing a budget, or investigating the potential cost of owning and operating a car over a year. (ACMGM009)

Yr 5 Math : Select and apply efficient mental and written strategies and appropriate digital technologies to solve problems involving all four operations with whole numbers

Investigate and calculate percentage discounts of 10%, 25% and 50% on sale items, with and without digital technologies