Papatūānuku, The Earth Mother Māori gods Social Studies

For the start of our Treaty of Waitangi unit, we have started to learn about the Māori Gods and had to create a poster about one of the gods, I chose Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother. There is a Māori legend about how the world of light was created. 

In the beginning, Papatūānuku, the Earth Mother and Ranginui, the Sky Father, were in a strong embrace. The sky and the earth were joined together, and their children were born between them. Their 7 children conspired to separate their parents, allowing light and life to thrive in the world. Their child Tāne Mahuta formed into a handstand and then separated his parents. The children became the main deities of the earth. This is how the Māori people explain the creation of the world. 

Papatūānuku is the Earth Mother, also known as Mother Earth. There are many other gods from other places in the world that are similar to Papatūānuku. Gaia was the Greek god, Tellus the Roman, Prithvi the Hindu and Houtou for the Chinese. These gods are quite similar in the fact that they are god or goddess of the Earth. 

My lessons in Gymnastics + Floor sequence + Trampoline + Beam

In PE, we have been doing a gymnastics unit. Each lesson we have been learning sequences which we had to film and then post up onto our blogs. During this unit so far, I have been trying very hard to develop my floor gymnastics skills. At the start of this unit, I was already able to do a forward roll and a backwards roll as well as a really bad cartwheel. Using my prior knowledge and a bit of help from my teacher, I was able to somewhat improve my cartwheel and make sure that my legs and back were straight. I have become incredibly invested in my floor routine and have been trying to improve something each week. After our latest lesson, I was able to kind of do a handstand into a forward roll but I still have quite far to improve on that skill. For the floor sequence, I have memorised both the first and second sequence and I am soon going to try work on the third sequence, that's where the handstand forward roll comes in.   

Here is my reflection on this unit.

On the video attached to the right, you can see my doing the second routine. I was having an extremely off day and had quite a bad headache so the work in this video is not exactly my best. I think I will redo this video taking if I do have the time to. My toes were nice and pointed during the cartwheel as well as with my arabesque but I do think that I need to straighten my legs and make it flow nicer. My forward and backward rolls were also really bad, but this is just because I had a headache. Next lesson I aim to refilm this routine and maybe start working on my trampoline routine. I'm not sure if the video will work, but when I wrote this post, it is there. I do think that my sequence could be flowier.  I think with the cartwheel my arms need to follow the flow of my legs. If I push off my arms more and then go onto pulling my arms up as my legs go down.

Here is my video of me trying to do the trampoline for the first time. After one practice, I videoed this as I had a wee panic because I didn't think I would have it done. Here I am doing a routine which is quite easy. I do think my controlled bounces were quite nice, I do think that I could work on keeping my body in the centre of the trampoline. But otherwise, the outcome of this was quite good for my first couple of tries.

Here is my final Gymnastics video. After not much preparation, I made a last-minute decision to make my final routine on the beam. I am very shaky during this routine, but I do think that it turned out alright for only practising it once before recording it. I had quite a hard time getting up on the beam itself, but I do think that after all of that my routine was okay. I think that I should have practised working on the other apparatus other than the floor primarily. I looked very scared of doing my routine, and that was because I was scared. I do think that I should have practised more.

Fifth practical for Home Economics Pad Thai

Teamwork Aspects 
This week was another great lesson for our team. When we make the Pad Thai this week, Mrs Hindson wrote down roles on our recipes so we were able to assign everyone roles so it was more organised this time around. An example of a role that I did was the cooking of the noodles, I had to watch over the stove and make sure that the noodles cooked properly and were, soft and easy to eat but still a little bit firm. I think that this addition made cooking much easier and made everyone's lives much easier. This weeks recipe was still quite simple, but the skills needed to be more of the measuring kind. The people in charge of making the sauce and the marinade needed to be very particular with their measurements because if they weren't it would throw off the taste of the dish.

Improvements 
I do think that we could have put less pepper in our final product as it threw off the taste quite a bit. I mean, I love pepper but it was way too overpowering. I would have prefered to put more of the sweet Chilli sauce in instead of the pepper but I wasn't in charge of the garnishing.

Product Outcome 
I think that our product was excellent and I think it had quite a nice fragrance to it, it had a nice essence of sweet Chilli sauce and fish sauce. When I took the first bite of our dish, I first got the texture of the peanuts and got a nice taste from that, and then I got the soft texture from the noodles and a nice hint of fish sauce. When I first bit into the chicken, I thought it was a bit dry but then I realised that it wasn't dry, it was just different compared to the noodles. I really got a big aftertaste of pepper after finishing my mouthful. The spring onions were a nice subtle note next to the punchiness of the other flavours in the dish, it came in right after the fish sauce taste. I really appreciated the addition of the peanuts as it made the dish more interesting to me and kept the textures and flavours balanced.

Modifications
We need to actually calm down on the salt and pepper because we keep on adding too much to our dishes and it ruins the taste for me. I do appreciate it when the pepper is there because it adds another flavour, but we need to balance the seasonings to fit the taste of the other elements. I love the enthusiasm we have but we need to think about the taste of the end product when seasoning. I would also use thicker noodles if I made this at home myself.

Next Steps 
Next time I think we just need to continue what we are doing. I'm not sure if Mrs Hindson will be giving us roles to take next time so I think we should take the responsibility and create the roles ourselves that are even and that will allow everyone to do something. This lesson was excellent and I think we need to continue what we are doing.

Home Economics Mix and Match activity Week 7

Something that I learned (mix and match cards) 
When the English settlers came to New Zealand, they brought their own different hunting methods, and ways of cooking compared to the Maoris. There were various hunting methods that the Maori people were not aware of that the English brought to New Zealand. The Maori knew about traps and spears, but the English introduced them into guns and other forms of hunting. These guns have now developed into different forms of technology for gathering food.

What can you see happening to our food in the future (50years)? What could you invent to change or directly effect relating to how food is produced for a cheaper price in the future? 

Food is necessary for survival, everyone needs it, without it, we all perish. Every being on this Earth needs food but with recent occurrences, we need to create different ways of producing food and meals that are available to everyone for cheap prices, that contains all the ingredients necessary to be nutritious and tasty. In the next 50 years, I think that the food eaten will be produced in labs as recently, new forms of lab-developed foods have been sold in stores and the idea seems to be quite popular with pretty healthy people. I don't really know if that is a good thing or a bad thing because we do need better ways of producing healthy and nutritious foods that won't be hard on the environment because the ways we are currently producing food is probably not the best way for the environment. But the food produced in 50 years time may be more focused on nutrition than the actual taste of the food. If it were to be produced in a lab it might not be the tastiest. If I could, I
would have a different, more effective way of producing meat products. I do think that the way we are going with lab-produced food is a good idea, but I would prefer a way of producing food that is similar to that but has quite a meaty taste to it. I do think that finding different means to particularly meat products would be quite difficult, especially for cheaper prices. I think that something such as using local labs maybe even in grocery stores that are quite small so that the stores can have their product fresh every day would be something cool. Using small local labs would be cheaper than having one big lab then shipping them different places would be interesting. 

Flamin' Heath Land Yacht

Aim
To build the fastest Wind racer out of the materials we were supplied.

Equipment 
Trolley (Cart chassis)
Cardboard
1 meter of paper roll
Scissors
2 meters of sellotape
Metal rod

Method 

1) Put the Metal rod into the trolley
2) Tape the strips of cardboard onto the base of the Metal rod so the base of the sail is formed.
3) Cut out a large triangle of paper and wrap it around the Metal Rod to form sails
4) Secure the sails onto the chassis with tape and tape any extra flappy bits down.
5) Make sure it is all secure and stable
6) Use the leaf blower to see how far it travels and the speed it travels.

Research 
https://www.instructables.com/id/Protei-Land-Yacht/

We took information from this website to figure out what shape our sails would be. We thought that the triangle shape would catch more wind and therefore go further than it would have compared to another shape. The triangle shape was quite a good choice and our design looked nice on that shape. We also want wheels on our chassis to be quite smooth but also have enough friction to stop it from completely falling over. We decided to put bits of cardboard near the base of the chassis just to ensure that it is still secure so it doesn't fall over and so the sails don't flap around.

Pictures 

Here we have some incredible photos of our land yacht. Molly painted Mr Heath on our land yacht.  Our yacht is called Flamin' Heath

Results 
The Velocity of our Land Yacht was 1.18MS-1
(at the time of updating my blog post, I forgot what the measurements were but I will update them when I find out)

To figure out what the Velocity of a moving object is, you need to divide the distance measured by the time measured.
Formula
V=⧍d/⧍t
The triangle means delta, delta means change. So the change of distance, divided by the change of time.

Discussion 
The initial launching of our land Yacht wasn't too bad and it did go 6.4M which was further than we thought it would be. I think if we used our cardboard more effectively by using more of it in more places nearer the base, we would have gone a bit further. I do think that for what we did, we got a good result. Molly and I worked well together and Molly did an excellent job with the designs of our sails. The science department seemed to appreciate the great feats of artistry. If we don't win most creative then I don't know what will.  I think that we did manage to make quite a nice land yacht. It didn't get very far but it went pretty far for what we had. During the race, if I had angeled the leafblower from a lower angle and happened to point it a bit higher up then it would have worked out a bit differently than it did today.


Conclusion 
In conclusion, the launching of our land yacht wasn't too bad and it went further than we expected. There are a few things that we would have changed such as the amount of cardboard and tape we used, but we are still very happy with the end result.

When measuring Velocity, be sure to use the correct formula.

Essay Pre-Planning continued

      This is the poster that our group did to answer the essay question; Describe a relationship between 2 or more characters in this text. Explain how this relationship helped you to understand at least one of the characters. Our group focused on the relationship between Fi, Ellie and Homer. 

Diversity of NZ Culture and Food Choices

29/08/2019
For Home Economics today, Rheanna, Jessica and I completed a mapping task. Each group member had the same map but with different parts of information that everyone needs. On the main map that we had to label the important places that are important to New Zealand food choices. We had to label them and put them on a map using keys. 

Map #1

On the first map, there was a list of settlers that came to New Zealand. We needed to place where they were located and why they located there. The settlers included the Scottish, English, Europeans, Asians, and the Polynesians. The different reasons they moved were because of reason such as humidity, the goldrush, similar environment, opportunity in trade and available land. This part of the map was really hard to complete as we could not exactly find very reliable information but we managed to find some. Key 2. had the information from Map #1. 

Map #2

The second map was probably the easiest to complete in a short amount of time. All we had to do was label the different areas that were marked out on the map. I completed this in five minutes and then went on to help the my other team members. Cities such as Auckland, Gisborne, Napier, and Christchurch were on the map. I used Key #1 to show where these are. 

Map #3

Map #3 was another map that seemed to be completed quite fast. On this map, there was a list of food types that are found in different areas around New Zealand. We had to place them where they are most readily available. Food types included Seafood, Vegetables, Carrots and Potatoes, Dairy Cattle, Wheat and Barley, Grapes, stone fruit and berries. All of the words that are coming out of the North and South island are the different types of foods and where they come from or are found commonly. We found out from this that at the top of the South Island, around Nelson, is where there is a lot of Horticulture (fruit).