He will upload videos of the yummy things he makes, in English and Mandarin, hoping to help English speaking kids learn Mandarin, and Chinese speaking kids learn English, all through simple cooking 🙂 So click on the link above and subscribe, coming soon will be his Lemonade Scones 🙂
Here is his latest upload, Mandarin Chef’s Tomato Soup (English and Chinese, together with the pinyin transcript to help learners below)
You will need to watch how to make Mandarin Chef’s special spice mix also for the Tomato Soup recipe, but once you have made a batch, it will be a good spice mix to marinate meats, fish, and add to soups 🙂
Transcript of Tomato Soup Recipe:
Peel the onion, then dice, jiāng yáng cōng qù pí qiè ding 將洋蔥去皮，切丁
Put a splash of oil in the pan, zài guō lǐ fàng yī diǎn yóu, 在鍋裡放一點油
Turn the stove on high, bǎ zào wēn dù tiáo gāo, 把灶温度调高
Put the onions in the pan, bǎ yáng cōng fàng zài guō lǐ, 把洋葱放在锅
Finely chop three cloves of garlic, 切碎三瓣大蒜, Qiē suì sān bàn dàsuàn
Add it with the onions, Jiā shàng yángcōng, 加上洋蔥
Sauté for a little, chǎo yī diǎn, 炒一点
Add one tablespoon of Mandarin Chef’s special spice mix, Jiārù yī tāng chí Mandarin Chef tè bié de xiāngliào, 加入一汤匙Mandarin Chef特别的香料
Watch my special spice mix video for the recipe, 观看我的特别香料视频以获取食谱, Guānkàn wǒ de tèbié xiāngliào shìpín yǐ huòqǔ shípǔ
chop two zucchinis, qie liǎng gè xī hú lu, 切两个西葫芦
Put it all in the pan, Fàng dào guō lǐ, 放到锅里
Chop Two carrots, Qie liǎng gè hú luó bo , 切两个胡萝卜
Add them to the pan, , 将它们添加到锅中, Jiāng tāmen tiānjiā dào guō zhōng
Chop 750g of tomatoes, 切碎七百五十克西红柿, Qiē suì qī bǎi wǔ shí kè xīhóngshì
Add them to the pan, 加入锅中Jiārù guō zhōng
And mix 并混合Bìng hùnhé
Add a 400g tin of diced tomatoes, 加一罐400克切成丁的西红柿 Jiā yī guàn Sìbǎi kè qièchéngdīng de xīhóngshì
Add 1L of chicken or vegetable stock 加入一公升的鸡肉或蔬菜汤, Jiārù yī gōngshēng de jīròu huò shūcài tang
And stir it in , 搅拌一下 Jiǎobàn yīxià
Bring to the boil and simmer for an hour 烧滚后改用中慢火焖一个小时 shāo gǔn hòu gǎiyòng zhōng màn huǒmèn yī gè xiǎo shí
Use a strainer to put your vegetables in the blender 使用滤网将蔬菜放入搅拌机 Shǐyòng lǜ wǎng jiāng shūcài fàng rù jiǎobànjī
Then you can blend your vegetables 搅拌蔬菜 jiao bàn shūcài
Mix the blended vegetables with the remaining tomato juice in the pan将混合的蔬菜和剩余的番茄汁一起放入锅中Jiāng hùnhé de shūcài hé shèngyú de fānqié zhī yīqǐ fàng rù guō zhōng
Serve it into a bowl 放入碗中 Fàng rù wǎn zhōng
Garnish with some basil, 装饰用罗勒 Zhuāngshì yòng luó lēi
Lucas has decided to make a series of bilingual cooking videos, so has started simple…good old Boiled Egg and Soldiers 🙂
He hopes the video will help both Chinese kids learning English, and English speaking kids learning Chinese. The script to the video, with the pinyin added for Chinese learners, is below,
When we hike around Taiwan later this year, our goal is to do it with
ZERO PLASTIC BOTTLED WATER
When we hiked the Himalayas in Nepal earlier this year we set ourselves the same goal and we did it! More to come about how to talk about this is Mandarin 🙂 But in the meantime here is a write up from Aurora about why and how we did it in Nepal:
We did lots of reading about Nepal and hiking as we prepared for our trip. We learned about the problems that rubbish is causing in the Himalayas, polluting all the rivers. Because the water is so polluted, it’s not safe to drink water in Nepal, we would need to buy lots of plastic bottles of water, adding to the rubbish problem.
When we first booked our flights for our adventure, we made a team emblem. It was our ‘footprints’ around the mountain representing each one of us, training together and supporting each other as a team, then hiking the Himalayan mountains! But they were also a literal representation too, to leave only ‘footprints’.
Lucas and I made the above picture to show our challenge! We had to help the rubbish problem, have safe drinking water, and leave only footprints, how on earth were we going to do that???????
We watched videos about the ‘mountains’ of rubbish that have been left behind by hikers and climbers in the Himalayas, and it was really sad. Even when it gets moved to mountain dumps it gets burned causing all kinds of toxic pollution.
As we have researched though we also found lots of people doing good things to help the rubbish problem, which was nice to see.
Like this one:
And this one, solving plastic bottle and poop pollution problem in one!
But we asked ourselves what can WE do as a family?
When we hike Australia we always bring our rubbish home. But we can’t do that in Nepal.
On our last hike in China, we bought bottled water from the guest houses along the way. We had to, as you can’t drink the water in China either. Although we didn’t throw the empty bottles along the trails, we did leave them in the guest house ‘bins’. But where did they go after that? When we were in Nepal, we saw how many of the guest houses in the mountains throw all the rubbish that the hikers leave behind into the river. When we were in Kathmandu, we walked along the river and saw all the mountains of rubbish that had flowed all the way from the villages. Here are some pictures of the rubbish we saw.
As you can see, sometimes we saw rubbish piled in holes along the mountain tracks, this gets ‘burned’ which is not good for the environment. Or we saw rubbish thrown from the guest houses into the rivers, which ends up in Kathmandu rivers.
We watched this TED ED video as a reminder that there is no throwing ‘away’ of a plastic bottle…
The third bottle in the video helps save the planet by being recycled…but in Nepal there is no official ‘recycle’ program.
The water being unsafe to drink in countries like China and Nepal has left hikers with no other option but to buy bottled water…which means several plastic bottles per day per hiker…with 100s of thousands of hikers …it’s not hard to work out the huge problem! The ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ slogan isn’t helping in a place like the Himalayas…
…So we decided to add another ‘R’…
REFUSE.
The challenge for us on our adventure in Nepal was
ZERO BOTTLED WATER.
So how do we do this when the water is not safe to drink?
A bonus is that as we have already hiked so much in the wilderness, so we already know a little about the different ways, and their pros and cons of treating water. We also read about what other trekkers in Nepal are doing.
There are a variety of ways to treat water, such as boiling, iodine tablets, pump filters, straw filter bottles, UV light etc., each one has its pros and cons. Here is what we plan to do on our hike in the Himalayas:
We are fortunate we already have a SteriPEN we bought few years ago when Mum and Dad started taking us on long hikes.
Here’s me using our SteriPEN to treat creek water on our Hinchinbrook Island hike.
The UV light of the SteriPEN kills bacteria, parasites and viruses in the water You have to fill a special litre water bottle, then put the pen in the water for 90 seconds. Usually we then fill our drink bottles of water bladders for the day.
The downsides are that the pen requires batteries, spare batteries can be heavy while hiking on long hikes. The pen kills stuff, but doesn’t filter…so the floaty bits and sediments will still be in the water. It could break, in that case you need a back up!
So for our trip to Nepal, we also bought a water filter bottle each. They were dear, but when we weighed up the cost of bottled water, and saving the environment, we thought the price was OK. So when we steripenned our water, we then poured the water into our filter bottles.
The filter bottles are a 2 stage filtration system. They filter out bacteria, Protozoa, gets rid of any dirt particles, reduces odor, bad taste and organic chemical matter such as pesticides. They can’t kill viruses, but our steripen does this, so we are covered by using both!
So here are the tools for our water treatment plan:
The time to treat everyday, and the extra weight to carry the Pen and spare batteries,were a little inconvenience. But we felt worth it to do our little bit to reduce the plastic pollution in this area of the world. Many other hikers are doing this too…if every hiker did this imagine the reduction in rubbish on the mountains!
Here is my Dad treating the first bottle of water when we arrived at our Kathmandu apartment. We were really scared to trust it at first!!!!! We had to trust the UV light was killing all the bacteria and that the filters in our bottles were working!
Here are a few piks of me on the trail, and Lucas in a Katmandu restaurant with our life saving life straw bottles! They went with us EVERYWHERE! We were able to fill our treatment bottle from the same source as the local villagers, treat with the steripen, then put in our own filter water bottles. Even though we were a little scared at first, Mum told me that this water would probably be better for us than our tap water in Australia, as the filters also filtered out the chemicals that would be used to treat our water in Australia! Can you spot our water bottles in the pictures??? One picture even has our steripen waiting to treat our water at our lunch stop for the afternoon!
It was good to be able to take action and do something to help reduce the pollution in Nepal’s rivers. We saw lots of other hikers using the LifeStraw filter bottles, and we met another Australian family using a steripen. We were the only ones using both! We hope that more and more hikers can spend a little extra money on a filter bottle, it will save them money having to buy bottled water and save the environment!
None of the online Nepali courses or YouTube channels are working for us! We were trying to find a ready made, kid friendly course…but all we could find were random phrase memorisation style programs, or isolated grammar videos.
There was one free course, developed by the Nepali Peace Corp that does seem to scaffold Nepali in a way that helps you build on sentences…and explains the grammar so that you can learn how to put a sentence together and substitute words to say what you actually want to say!!! But it is so old it looks like the pdf download was actually scanned from a document typed by a typewriter!!!! It is not a kid friendly course at all. I originally dismissed it for this reason….But it may be all we have to work with to help us build our Nepali!
SOOOOO…….I have spent the last week following the course myself, learning the aspects of Nepali grammar and memorising the sentences, and starting to get a feel for Nepali word order, and how the pronouns and verbs work in different sentences. I’m a language teacher!!! So I am learning 1 step ahead of the kids, and creating our own resources to learn together in a more kid friendly way!
I am creating our own documents as we go through the course, colour coding grammar aspects so that we can clearly see which word in the sentence is the pronoun, noun, verb, question word, adjective etc., so that we can start to substitute words in the sentence patterns as we learn them. We have colour coded flash cards for games. Kids are writing the conversations in the same colours, and memorising them. We are learning vocab through kinesthetic gesture, props and music, what we call a WAM session, (words, action, music). Most of the gestures in the above video are taken from Auslan Sign Language. We use these to teach Chinese too, so we are already familiar. Gestures help link meaning and aid in recall. The music provides a rhythm and focus, plus the kids get to listen to their fave songs while learning Nepali 🙂
We are finding our way together, and relying on poor quality sound files for pronunciation. So our plan is to learn as many conversations as we can each week, then hope to practice what we have learned via Facetime with a Nepali speaker 🙂
Below are the sentence patterns we are learning first, and the tables below that contain the vocab for those first sentence builders. We have colour coded these on our files as Verbs-Red, Nouns-Blue, Adjectives-Green, Question words-Orange, Pronouns-Purple, Conjunctions and Other words-Black. Sorry I cannot upload tables in colour on this blog 🙁 But you can see from the piks above how we have coloured our own learning materials 🙂
Conversation 1
namaste.
namaste.
tapaaiko naam ke ho?
mero naam Aurora ho.
wahaako naam ke ho?
wahaako naam Lucas ho.
tapaaiko ghar kahaa ho?
mero ghar astreliya ho.
wahaako ghar kahaa ho?
wahaako ghar nepaal ho.
Conversation 2
yo ke ho?
yo kalam ho.
yo kasko kalam ho?
yo mero kalam ho.
tyo ke ho?
tyo kitaab ho.
tyo kasko kitaab ho?
tyo wahaako kitaab ho.
yo ni?
tyo tapaaiko kitaab ho.
Conversation 3
tyo ke ho?
yo kitaab ho.
tyo kasko kitaab ho?
yo mero kitaab ho.
kitaab kholnus. tapaaile ke gareko?
maile kitaab kholeko.
wahaale ke gareko?
wahaale kitaab kholeko.
Conversation 4
Lucas!
hajur.
tyo kalam ho?
hoina.
tyo ke ho ta?
yo kaapi ho.
tyo kasko kaapi ho?
yo mero kaapi ho.
Conversation 5
tyo ke ho?
yo kalam ho.
tyo kasko kalam ho?
yo mero kalam ho.
tapaaiko kalam kasto chha?
mero kalam kaalo chha.
kalam dinos. tapaaile ke gareko?
maile kalam dieko.
Conversation 6
tyo ke ho?
yo jholaa ho.
tyo kasko jholaa ho?
yo wahaako jholaa ho.
tyo jholaa kasto chha?
yo jholaa seto chha.
tyo jholaa dinos. tapaaile ke gareko?
maile jholaa dieko.
Conversation 7
Aurora!
hajur.
tyo kasko kitaab ho?
yo mero kitaab ho.
paDhnos. tapaaile ke gareko?
maile paDheko.
tapaaile kasko kitaab paDheko?
maile mero kitaab paDheko.
Verbs
Nouns
chha
Is (to be )
(to locate things and people) eg. the pen is on the table, He is at home
Also quality of something or somebody
ghar
home, house
dinu
To give
jholaa
shoulder bag
garnu
To do
kaapi
note book
kholnu
To open
kalam
pen
paDhnu
To read
kamij
shirt
ho
Is (to be) (define something or somebody) eg. This is my house
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 🙂
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 🙂
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 🙂
Our goal of trekking around the Annapurna is our ‘Everest’. We have been reading biographies of Alyssa Azar (youngest Australian to climb Everest) and Jordan Romero (youngest worldwide to climb Everest at 13!!!!!), sharing their journey of achieving their goal, and inspiring kids to go for their own ‘Everest’ whatever their dream might be. We learn so much from their stories, from their experience travelling new cultures, planning, failing, hard work, training, safety etc., and especially BALANCE.
We have also just read Solli Raphael’s new book ‘Limelight’. He hasn’t climbed Everest :-), but at 13 has written a book inspiring kids to follow their dreams too, this time through slam poetry! At 12 he won the Australian Slam Poetry Competition, beating Adults! Here he is performing his winning slam:
His poetry is awesome, he’s not just good at poetry though, he has a passion to rally all of his generation to help change the world for the better. He gives good advice, not just about metaphors and similes 🙂 But also about the importance of well being, balance, and BREATHING…did you hear in the above poem…Breath In, Breath Out :-). His saxophone playing, his long distance running training, his tennis playing, are not just other interests, they contribute to to his mental and physical health, a balance that makes the ideas, the words, the creativity, the nerves of ‘slamming’ all possible for him. It is this BALANCE that we are focusing on as we read Solli’s poetry.
We’re not all great poets or Everest climbers…but just as we can achieve our own personal physical goals, playing with and being mindful with words can help us to transform those goals from the words of a ‘training plan’ to discovering our goals on a more personal and emotional level, from within.
We are going to try and write our own poems about our journeys, but first we are exploring the genre of SLAM. Slam is like the RAP of poetry. So to get us warmed up, we thought we would learn a RAP. But, as we need to maintain our Mandarin while we learn Nepali, we thought we would learn a RAP in Mandarin 🙂 Our goal to trek around the Annapurna is about having a goal that will keep BALANCE in focus, a goal that we can integrate all our learning areas with a focus on our inner, local and global ‘Well being’. So we are learning a RAP in Mandarin about having a ‘Balanced Lifestyle’. Memorising this rap, and making a video to go with it, will help us to talk about the topic of having a balanced lifestyle while we achieve our goals, with friends in China. And of course it integrates LOTE, English, Health, Music, Arts and Technology. It will help us to share bilingually what we think is important to achieve our goals.
We found the site Mandarin Rap Podcast for learning how to talk about some deeper topics in Chinese through learning Rap! It’s a great site, check it out! We found a rap about Lifestyle Balance on the site.
Here is the video of Aurora and Lucas singing the Rap. They added images to help with meaning, as well as subtitles in Mandarin and English. Lyrics in Chinese characters, pinyin and English translation below.
Aiya! I’m really tired. No time to rest, no time to rest…
A balanced life is important
Students’ have such a lot of stress
Homework and revision are piling up.
So busy every day that we’re going round in circles.
The pace of life is really fast!
Lots of adults all hope
To get bonuses and promotions
All day, working from dawn till dusk
They have no way to look after their families.
Free time and leisure are always rare
But a balanced life is so important
Let everyone take action
We all need to adjust and make changes
Vegetables, fruit – eat them every day.
Drink more water; drink less coffee
Never set foot in McDonalds
Give up smoking and limit drinking – that’s the way.
Don’t forget to do enough sports
Keep on burning calories
Exercising every day is good for your health
Early to bed, early to rise: you won’t grow old!
Aust Curriculum Links
Media Arts
Yr 7 – Plan, structure and design media artworks that engage audiences – selecting footage, editing the footage into a sequence and applying a soundtrack that matches the edited sequence’s pace, rhythm and style
English
Yr 7 Use interaction skills when discussing and presenting ideas and information, selecting body language, voice qualities and other elements, (for example music and sound) to add interest and meaning
Analyse and explain the ways text structures and language features shape meaning and vary according to audience and purpose
Use a range of software, including word processing programs, to create, edit and publish texts imaginatively
LOTE Chinese
Yr 5/6 Create short bilingual texts on topics of personal interest and on key content from other learning areas and provide subtitles or commentary to assist meaning
Yr 7/8 Analyse, compare and present perspectives on topics of interest, identifying the different ways emotions, intentions and ideas are expressed
Health
Yr7/8 reflecting on the physical, social, emotional and spiritual benefits to health and wellbeing of being outdoors and of being active in a natural setting
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???
They figured they could just guess a length, multiply it and see if it was close to 150. 16 x16? too much. Tried 8×8, too little. 14, too much, and so on. They decided to make them 12cm long and wide. When they measured and cut them, they found they had over half the sheet left…hmmm, calculations must have been wrong. So they made an extra set of flags at 15cm each, as they thought the others were too small anyway! Where did they go wrong? All their calculations had been correct, but the initial measuring of the sheet with the tape measure might have been wrong. Fortunately this mistake left them with surplus flags! But my controlling this activity for them would have prevented them from making a mistake, one that didn’t really matter in the big scheme of things, but it’s because the mistake isn’t really going to hurt them in any way that it is such an important aspect in the process of ‘learning’.
The neighbours joined in making prayer flags with us 🙂
Next was to work out how to dye the flags. They noticed that our prayer flags we have hanging on our deck, are white, blue, red, yellow and green. We looked at material dyes online, average price $10 each, we would need 4, too dear for our little project. Aurora researched into natural dyes, we bake using ‘foods’ for natural colours, so she found videos of using natural ways to dye materials. But we worked out once we had bought the foods for all the colours, would be too expensive and time consuming…red cabbage so expensive, then boiling for 2 hours…didn’t sound practical. Then Aurora suggested food colouring, which we never buy but figured the cheapest solution for the small quantity of material we needed to dye..we got each colour for $1.14 each 🙂 This took a couple hours of research and chatting to get to this decision…but lots of reading and reasoning to get there.
Once dried we could paint the Nepali Alphabet on them. Here’s Lucas using a video he found for painting the vowel symbols. The lady had made the video for teaching the Nepali Alphabet to kids, so we could learn the sounds as we painted.
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
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
