April 11, 2021

K’gari Great Walk

We are off to K’gari in a few weeks, to journey the 90km K’gari Great Walk 🙂 We can look at this as training for our Walkabout on Palawa Country, or an adventure in itself 🙂 However we look at it, the preparations for this mini adventure are providing opportunities to consolidate lots of the things that we are already learning about in our daily chats.

 

As we have been reading the Upside Down History of Australia together, we were interested to find out the history of ‘Fraser’ Island.  The kids presumed it had been named after some ‘explorer’ like many of the other places of significance ‘found’ by European settlers.  But we have learned that the ‘story’ has far more to it than some self righteous explorer, the protagonist is a shipwrecked English woman captured by ‘savages’: Eliza Fraser.

Frontispiece to the 1837 New York pamphlet, ‘Narrative of the Capture. Sufferings and Miraculous Escape of Mrs. Eliza Fraser’. (University of Queensland)

The resources put together by Reconciliation Australia and SBS have helped us to understand not only the Butchulla peoples perspective of the ‘story’, but have helped the kids to understand the concept of ‘fake news’ on a deeper level than the way the term is merely thrown about today, through the analysis and deconstruction of a history significant to a place that we are about to take a journey on.

The interactive video, together with lots of learning resources can be found on SBS learn page ‘Discover Australia’s First Fake News Story‘.  The interactive was a collaboration by Butchulla artist Fiona Foley, academic Larissa Behrendt, with immersive animation by Torres Strait Islander artist, Tori-Jay Mordey.  Alongside imagery, and an interactive ability to wipe away the ‘words’ that create myths, we hear another perspective of the history.

It has inspired us to read the book that the interactive was born from ‘Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling‘ by Larissa Behrendt, which we have on placed on hold at our library.

As a learning sample for Aurora’s English, she is using the above resources to analyse the ‘words’ used in Eliza’s account and the newspaper reports, that if ‘viral’ was a thing in 1836…they went viral around the world 🙂 Her task is to imagine what if the Butchilla people published a newspaper in 1836 too, and how they might have wrote the ‘news story’ of ‘Saving Eliza’.  As a reporter interviewing the Butchilla people in 1836, Aurora has to create this new story, reporting only the facts, from their perspective.  We can’t change history, but the exercise is helping us to understand that how history is told is the way ‘today’ is constructed.  How would history have changed if reporter Aurora’s Butchilla news story had gone viral?

As we research many of the areas that we explore and hike in, we are learning the names of places as they were referred to before Europeans declared these places ‘Terra Nullius’ and named them after themselves.  This interactive helps us to understand the importance of this ‘dual’ naming of places, as a step towards reclaiming true history.  As a result, we will now refer to ‘Fraser’ Island as ‘K’gari’ (pronounced Gurri).

Our instructions for driving onto K’gari, tell us to reduce our tyre pressure to 22 PSI.  Just so happens we have been learning about ‘pressure’ in our Life of Fred stories ‘Pre-Algebra with Physics’.

We learned that pressure is measured in pounds per square inch, or ‘PSI’.

We learned this as Fred had to dive in a lake to retrieve a golf ball that had just hit him on the head, wearing a mask made of window glass bought from a dodgy guy… now the kids know what PSI means, they can help their Dad measure the air pressure in our tyres before we drive onto K’gari, and I am sure their Dad will be delighted when they give him a physics and maths lesson about all that they have learned about pressure in our Fred story 🙂

We haven’t even started on the track notes of the walk, or how on earth we are going to carry food and all our gear for 6 days (the longest thru hike we have completed up to now is 5 days), and we need to build up to 8 days for our Tassie hikes…a little geography and some maths to calculate our best weight distribution coming soon 🙂

December 15, 2020

‘Being’ a Speed Cuber

Lucas got into trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube a little while ago, and with intrinsic motivation persevered through algorithm after algorithm till he cracked it.  The cube is like a fidget spinner with a purpose.  It’s a problem to solve.  It requires dexterity and focus.  Some kids are labeled with an inability to focus, yet when they are faced with a problem that they want to solve, their brain and hands work together, for a loooong problem solving time.

I even made Lucas follow the instructions in Mandarin for his first 2×2 solve 🙂 It’s just what I do to make life harder for him:-)

Of course, once the 2×2 and 3×3 was cracked, the 4×4, 5×5, 6×6, and most recently the 9×9 had to be conquered.  The pyraminx and some 12 sided pentagonal one has been conquered too, just been advised this is called the megaminx 🙂  Solving cubes has become a bit of a pursuit 🙂

Then he taught me how to do the cube 🙂 Completing it once took me all day, and was enough algorithm and permutation exercise for my mind, needless to say I have not had the urge to do it again 🙂

Since a group of his mates have entered a Speed Cube comp being held in Brisbane next month, Lucas has been injected with a next level motivation.  SPEED is his next mountain to conquer.

I don’t have a competitive bone in my body, and actually loathe competitions organized for kids…..spelling bees agggghhhhh!!! We had big chats about comps.  What are they all about? When I enter a fun run, I know that I will be close to last, but it doesn’t stop me from taking part, keeping fit and having fun with community.  I enter 50km trail races, not as a race, but just as a goal to finish it, and again be part of a encouraging community of like minded peeps. As long as I beat the cut off time, I have no desire to get faster.

So what about a Speed Cubing comp??? The title itself emphasises speed, not the same vibe as a ‘fun run’.  Lucas’s record (not average as we are learning all about in the Speed Cube world :-)) from a random scramble of the 3×3 is currently 30.75 seconds.

That is freakin awesome, I can’t do one side in that lol 😂.  I think the average in this comp though will be about sub 12 seconds, and one of the competitors Felix Zemdegs who has registered in this Brisbane comp and who is a bit of a legend Cuber has an average of 6.54 seconds, and held the world record of 4.22 for a while. Both Felix and another previous world record holder Collin Burns (5.25 seconds) are in this video here, a great video explaining what is involved in speed solving a cube…and quite motivational for Lucas too, knowing that when Collin first competed, Lucas is faster than he was then 🙂 Like the video says, you don’t become a world record holder overnight 🙂

After all our chats, Lucas was still keen to enter, to be part of the buzz of likeminded peeps, to participate and have fun, and to give him a goal to exercise his mind and improve his solving speed.  We have hiking goals that we have to get fit for, I study and keep my Mandarin up to exercise my mind… this is his mind goal: his motivation to learn, and practice to get faster.  He has learned beginners’ algorithms to solve the cube, he is now searching websites and YouTube videos for advanced permutations to solve the puzzle more ‘efficiently’.

The ‘maths’ outcomes in the curriculum that are explored in solving the cube range from early learning concepts to advanced maths.  As part of my TESOL certificate that I completed this year, I had to create a unit of work for a Upper Primary English as a Foreign Language class, that integrated another subject area. Being around my Cuber, together with making the connections to the maths curriculum outcomes covered by learning how to solve the cube, are what inspired me to create a whole unit of work spring boarding from solving the cube, integrating EFL and Maths. I won’t go into detail here of the curriculum links and the skills built…the unit plan has it all in there, so click on the link for a download of the lesson plan, the lesson plan has all the links attached to it that were used to create the plan 🙂 Lucas and Aurora helped me make the videos that go with the unit, and of course want to be my teaching assistants if I ever go to Taiwan and actually teach the unit…they said ‘Great lesson plan Mum, but how you gonna fix the kids’ cubes when they bugger up?’  🙂  Even though the plan is for teaching English as a foreign language, it was based on regular resources, so would be useful for any teacher or homeschool parent, not just as an integrated EFL plan. TESOL 502 Ass 2 CLIL Meet the Cube Unit of Work

This Ted Ed video shows how advanced maths, and even how music fits into all this…it’s a bit mind blowing, it’s like a video that might explain the molecular chemistry involved in making a cheese and vegemite sandwich…totally superfluous to what you need to know to make a sandwich 🙂 But it does open up the mind to where a cube can take you in Maths 🙂

Then there is all the learning about the World Cubing Association, their rules, their events, scheduling, procedures, registering and paying…he’s paid the fee himself.  Then all the maths involved in the recordings of times and calculations of averages required to assess who goes to the next level…the learnings are limitless.

When a kid that finds it hard to focus is focused on something like this,  you just have to let them ‘be’ and ‘be’ there for them….and make sure they put the cube down every now and then to balance exercising the other parts of their body and to hang the washing out 🙂

Next, is me coming to terms with the fact that I am going to have to spend 2 full days hanging around in a room with hundreds of speed cubing geeks! Not my first choice of how to spend my full weekend…but our kids have had to spend days of supporting their Dad in Ironman events, or Mum and Dad in long trail runs…I think I can manage a weekend supporting Lucas 🙂 I think I might even have fun 🙂

December 5, 2020

Aboriginal Perspectives – Upside-Down History of Down Under

The Bibbulmun Track traverses the country of a sub-group of the Nyungar, Nyoongar or Noongar people. As the Noongar people are known and acknowledged as the traditional owners and custodians of the land and waters over which the Bibbulmun Track passes, naturally this cultural connection will be integrated into our elemental learning, as we prepare to cross Bibbulmun Country.

We have already found some library books and been watching some videos that are giving us some initial connections to our learnings, which we will write about soon.

Aboriginal perspectives in Australia are important to us as a family.  We don’t really ‘do’ history in any formal way, other than coming across great historical ‘fiction’, movies, news and events etc. that often serve as a springboard to discuss issues and perspectives.  Lucas loved the ‘Treehouse’ books that Terry Denton co-wrote and illustrated, in fact, as a reluctant reader, they are the only books he has literally ‘read’ and looked forward to each sequel coming out.  Terry Denton has literally, very cleverly, had every reluctant reader boy in Australia ‘reading’ his books 🙂

So when I found this ‘Upside-Down History of Down Under’ co-written and illustrated with his typical cartoon humour by Terry Denton, aimed at around Year 8 kids, I thought it would be a great Aussie History book for us to read together, and I have not been disappointed :-).  It tells the story of Australia from 230 million years ago to Federation.

It is easy to read, full of diagrams and cartoons, and has the right amount of ‘bigger’ words, not disrupting an easy flow, but enough to extend thinking and promote discussion. It weaves where the authors may have found evidence about what they are writing: science, oral stories, newspapers, journals…again not disrupting the flow but mentioned here and there to promote discussion of perspectives and interests in the construction of history.

C0-writer Alison Lloyd also has a website with more info and a teacher’s guide if you wanted to do some extension activities, the book is also loaded with stats, numbers and geological events that can springboard maths and science explorations …but just reading together is enough to spark lots of conversations and discussion, and we will of course integrate it into the other things we are leading to at the moment 🙂

Love finding these gems created by peeps that know how to engage kids in meaningful learning 🙂

November 29, 2020

Our first dehydrated camp meal

We are going on a 1 night overnight hike next weekend 🙂 This is our first overnight hike for over a year (cos of COVID)…so mostly this first little overnighter is to get us back into the swing of thru hikes, and test out the gear that has been sitting on a shelf for a while 🙂

But this post is all about the food 🙂 We have been busy reading dehydrating books and searching dehydrating tips to see what we can try out for our first attempt at actually dehydrating a camp meal 🙂

So we thought we would start simple.  We will cook our regular kind of hike meal, angel hair pasta and a tin of tuna 🙂 But this time we will add some veg.    We bought a mandolin so that we could slice our veg evenly, we got a Baccarat one that was worth $100 for $20 in the sales 🙂

We chose capsicum and zucchini to go into our pasta dish.  Here is the zucchini being sliced, marinated in chilli, lemon oil and paprika, and dried. We thought it would add a little flavour to our pasta dish 🙂  488g worth of zucchini reduced to 42g 🙂

Here are our capsicums.  We bought a bag of organic ones just about to go out of date so got a bargain 🙂 Bag contained 175g of capsicums.  After dehydrating…. 10g 🙂 These will get cooked with our pasta together with the zucchini.

For a snack when we arrive at camp, we thought we would have some sweet potato chips 🙂 These haven’t quite turned out like a bag of Kettle Chips unfortunately 🙂  But they taste OK and are a nutritious snack at less weight than 4 sweet potatoes 🙂 And they haven’t been deep fried 🙂

Then we need those energy treats that we always take on a hike with us…usually in the form of snakes, because they are a light hit of sugar to give us a boost…but unfortunately contain zero nutrition.  So we thought we would try our own roll up kinda treat to give us the same boost.  We blended half a pineapple and 3 pears to spread out in our dehydrator and make our own healthy roll ups.  These actually turned out YUM.

We have to be careful as you could easily eat the whole lot 2 trays of roll up to yourself in one hit…and there is no way you could eat half a pineapple and 3 pears as easy 🙂 It makes you wonder about the amount of sugar we can easily consume when we eat these processed snakes or roll ups…they contain spoons and spoons of sugar and hardly any nutrition (even the so called fruit roll ups are mostly just sugar with fruit flavouring).  So as long as we understand that we should limit our intake of our new home made roll ups on a hike, we are getting a natural sugar boost packed with lots of vitamins and fibre 🙂  We used half the pineapple and 3 pears, so what would weigh 1068g in our packs for this heathy treat, now will only weigh 56g 🙂

The next stage…vacuum packing our dehydrated food 🙂 Dehydrated food should last months, but vacuuming it will help it to last longer, and reduces volume 🙂 We managed to pick up a vacuum sealer that was $210 but $89 in the sales 🙂 So here is our veg and fruit for one night’s hike, all vacuum sealed:

A whopping 2.472kg of healthy food reduced to 189g

We have learned that we can easily carry multiple days of nutritious fruit and veg on our hikes at this weight. But it will take an enormous amount of planning and time to dehydrate and seal for a hike that will take a few months.  We will need a bigger dehydrator and silicon mats for our fruit roll ups, as it takes ages to cut paper to the shape of a round dehydrator, and peeling the paper off was not easy 🙂 But for our first attempt not a bad job 🙂 Proof will be in the eating next weekend 🙂

November 27, 2020

Walking and helping nature out a little bit

Lucas has bought himself a rubbish picker so that he can help nature out a little bit while we go on our walks.

At one of our local wetlands yesterday he filled 2 bags of rubbish, cans, bottles, chip/lolly wrappers, anti-bacterial wipes, fishing wire, pliers, an atomiser spray pump, maccas and 7/11 smoothie cups, cigarette butts, bottle tops….and we only walked for 1km (and 1km back).

He collected 10 bottles and cans that can be recycled at cash for containers, so a bonus dollar to add to his next trip there 🙂

When walking as much as we do, cleaning up the rubbish is something we may as well do, helping us be in the moment with purpose, and helping our natural environment too 🙂

 

November 17, 2020

The cost to run a dehydrator…useful maths

This Ted Talk video came into my feed again yesterday, ‘Why math instruction is unnecessary’. which was timely as I needed a reminder that not making my kids do hours of maths drills will not ruin their lives…in fact quite the opposite…just doing the bare minimum useful maths will mean that they won’t suffer from ‘maths anxiety’ which is what makes kids avoid maths forever after school!

He explains that deductive and inductive reasoning is what our kids should be practicing.  I do have waves of doubt sometimes that my kids don’t go through thick text books of maths 🙂 But I felt pretty happy yesterday re-watching this video just after my kids had been solving a problem in their ‘Life of Fred’ book, asking them to find out how many diagonals a 200 sided polygon had.  Now I doubt they will ever need to remember or ever use this fact…but in the typical Life of Fred way it was asking this question to encourage them to logically work out a way to find the answer.  Here are the pages from their working out books:

The previous questions had asked how many diagonals a rectangle, a pentagon, and a hexagon had, which they worked out by drawing the shape and the diagonals.  2,5 and 9.  Lucas then drew a heptagon and an octagon, and identified a pattern.  He couldn’t work out how to fast track that pattern to a 200 sided shape, but he started to make a table and follow the pattern to record the number of diagonals for each shape as it increased in sides. When he got to 25 he noticed that he could safely increase his shapes in the table by 10 sides and calculate the diagonals, finally fast tracking to the conclusion that 200 x 98.5 would give him the answer he needed.

Aurora thought for a while, worked out that what she needed to find out was a value in an arithmetic series…she made a connection to a previous Fred book that had stepped the reader through a formula that students don’t normally learn till second year advanced algebra…but it was just useful for Fred at that time and fairly easy to follow…so why not?  She found the Fred book she wanted, slowly worked out the figures she needed to pop into the formula, and after a few attempts finally figured it out, 19700 diagonals 🙂

They both arrived at the same correct answer, took them both a while, but they nutted it out in their own different but logical way.

But what does this have to do with dehydrators?  Well the discussions in the house while we have had the dehydrator running all night experimenting for our long trail adventure, is whether it is economically worth it.  The treasurer of the house (Dad) having panic attacks at how much our electricity bill is going to be next time 🙂  So I asked the kids to find out how much it costs to run a dehydrator.

They found a website that gave them a formula to calculate how much it costs to use a dehydrator.

(Wattage of appliance × Hours needed) / 1000 = Kilowatt-hour (kWh) consumption

Cost = kWh x cost per kWh

They then had to find the values to put into the formula.  They had to find the wattage of our dehydrating appliance, and how much it costs us per kWh on our electric bill.  Lucas found the formula, it took them both a while to find where the cost per kWh was on our electricity bill, but they found it eventually, and Aurora neatly laid the information out, calculating how much a typical 12 hour dehydrating stint would cost.  Here are their calcs, working out that our machine would cost around 35cents to run for 12 hours.  She also did a little additional calc working out it will cost us around $21 if we were to run the machine nightly for 2 months to pre-make lots of snacks and meals.

Calculations of how much it costs to run our dehydrator

What we learned:

  • Definitely more cost effective by far than buying commercial dehydrated camp food, even if we were to run it every night for months making all our dinners for 3 months
  • We can confidently continue to experiment knowing our treasurer won’t have a heart attack 🙂
  • We can calculate anything if we can find the formula
  • If we look into buying a bigger dehydrator further down the track, to take the wattage of the appliance into consideration when comparing the ones on the market, pop it into our formula and calculate the cost to run, also taking into consideration if it is bigger then it has to be run less times 🙂
November 16, 2020

The science and safety of dehydrating food

When we hiked Wilson’s Prom (Vic) and Hinchinbrook Island (Qld), we had to be self sufficient carrying everything we needed for the 5 days on the trail.  We survived on nuts and sultanas, tuna and crackers, and noodles.  Our longer hikes in Langtang Nepal (Mandarin version of video)  and Tiger Leaping Gorge (China), we were spoiled with tea houses along the way to fill up with hearty food.

We want to do a really really long, self-sufficient trail next 🙂 On any of our expeditions, we have researched into the best, lightest and affordable equipment to ensure a safe and enjoyable hike.  It really doesn’t matter how fancy your gear is though, it’s our bodies that are moving us through the hike! We need to look after them. Which means that we are going to have to think about our nutrition…noodles and angel hair pasta with no veg for 3 months isn’t looking after that most valuable piece of equipment.

We have been watching lots of vlogs of hikers doing these long trails, and we are learning that many hikers pre make and dehydrate all their meals, box them, and mail them to towns along the route of the trail, ready for their next self-sufficient stint 🙂 It saves the $13 per meal per person you need to spend for a similar dehydrated meal in the camp shops…which would be over $3000 over 2 months JUST for DINNER alone. Plus you have preservative and additive free meals 🙂  Some just take fruit and veg dehydrated separately, and just add them to their regular noodle meals.  Some dehydrate whole dinners, whipping out their powder in a zip lock at the end of the day and rehydrating a coq au vin for dinner 🙂

We were given a used dehydrator over a year ago, and it has been sitting in the box under the stairs.  So we thought we would get it out, and start to explore the world of dehydrating foods 🙂

It takes months to experiment and master dehydrating and rehydrating full meals. So we are learning all about the science and safety of food dehydrating, starting with the easiest: fruit 🙂

Lucas in the moment slicing his favourite fruit for our first attempt in dehydrating 🙂

Over next few months we are going to experiment and learn everything we need to know about making our own dehydrated meals for a long trail 🙂 We have reserved some dehydrating books from the library 🙂  We have watched YouTube videos 🙂 We have learned up to now:

  • Food spoils because the mould and bacteria that spoil it like the moisture and in it  🙂
  • Dehydrating it will get rid of the moisture and so make it last much longer
  • Drying food is a preserving method that has been done naturally by many cultures for centuries (we saw lots of families drying their fish or chillies on the streets in China)
  • Dehydrating it also kills enzymes, which you really want to not kill…and although dehydrating machines probably aren’t as good as the sun, dehydrating longer at lower temps kills less enzymes apparently, and we can control this with our machines.
  • After our first few attempts of fruit, we found that it’s really hard to tell whether the food has dehydrated enough, and therefore if it is going to be safe to keep for months…

We are going to continue for a few months, experiment and read and learn about the science a little more, and hopefully become confident dehydrators 🙂 We may have to invest in a bigger machine though if we go ahead and try and make all our meals for a 3 month hike.

We have already discussed a future challenge once the kids have experimented with lots of foods.  They will need to make a  dehydrated meal to take on an overnight hike with us.  It will need to be nutritionally balanced, tasty, safely prepared, packaged like the ones in the camp shop, selling us with enticing images and scientific information, labelled on the back with nutrition content and reheating instructions etc.  We thought it would be a great challenge integrating science, technology, health, maths, English, marketing, design, visual arts and apparently business…as after chatting about the challenge together, they seemed pretty keen and their first question was ‘Will we get paid the $13 for it?’ 🙂

I am sure updates on our dehydrating journey will follow 🙂