Preparation for Athletics

For the past month we've been getting ready for athletics day (which is next Thursday by the way). This year I decided to compete in the competitive group and I chose javelin, discus, long jump, triple jump, and the 100m sprint as my sports. 

What I have improved on since the year began

I personally think I've improved my javelin greatly. I've become much more consistent with my throwing and have actually been seeking tips from teachers and other students who are much better at javelin then me. I've also learnt how to make the javelin actually land with the tip first instead of the tail. I also think I'm throwing straighter then I was at the start of the year too. I just have to keep in mind that I need to throw upwards a little rather than just straight. I've also learnt how to do triple jump and even though I can't say for sure that I've improved I can say is that I've learnt how to do the jump properly which is good.

What I'm excited and not excited about

I'm really excited about discus, long jump, and javelin. I'm excited about discus mainly because I attempted to do competitive discus in year 6 and was shy of just a couple of centimeters which was kinda disappointing. I'm excited about long jump and javelin because I enjoy the two sports and I'm decent at long jump. However I'm not excited about the 100m sprint because I'm not great at sprints and I don't really enjoy running. Other than that I'm excited for athletics day.

This week (technically last week) in home economics: Breakfast Muffins

Last week in home economics we created breakfast muffins. The end product came out well and the recipe was simple to follow. 

Breakfast muffin recipe

Ingredients

1/2 Tbsp Olive oil

1/2 an onion - diced

2 Slices of ham

4 Cherry tomatoes

1 1/2 cups Self raising flour

1 Tbsp Parsley - chopped

2 Eggs

1/2 cup Grated chesse

1/2 tsp Smoked paprika

1/2 cup Milk (add a couple of extra tablespoons if needed)

Salt and black pepper for taste

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 185C on fan bake and spray muffin tin with canola spray.
2. Heat oil in a pan and saute onion for 3-4 minutes or until onion is soft. Once done set aside to cool.
3. In a large bowl combine tomatoes, flour, parsley, cheese, paprika and season.
4. Add cooked onion and use fold technique. 
5. Whisk milk and eggs together and fold into other ingredients until combined.
6. Spoon even amounts into each muffin tin and bake for 12 - 15 minutes until golden and puffed.

Bonus

To make a nice herb butter to serve muffins with combine 50g of butter and 1tsp of chopped parsley. 

Folding technique 

The folding technique is a type of stirring where instead of stirring with a wooden spoon you fold with a metal spoon. It's easier to show than explain it through writing so below is a video of how to fold.:

            

Reflection

The good things

I think that everything went fairly well. My group worked well together in my opinion and thought that the muffins came out well. The muffins were delicious and I thoroughly enjoyed them. I also might make the herb butter next time because I think it would tasted really nice with it. 

The bad things

Nothing really bad happened. I mean there were a few bumps such as me not putting the muffins in long enough but they only needed an extra 2-3 minutes. Someone did accidentally turn off another groups oven so I'll have to make sure that my groups oven is on every now and then so it doesn't happen to us. Other then those two things nothing extreme happened to my group and everything ran smoothly.

Overall

I really enjoyed making this recipe. It was simple and I learnt things such as the folding technique, how to tell when batter is done in the oven, and a few other things. I like how the recipes we've been doing are easy to change and you can replace ingredients or remove them to your liking. 

The slave trade triangle

In social studies we're learning about slavery as part of our human rights unit. We started off learning about the slave trade triangle which I have mapped out below:


The slave trade triangle was a trading system between Europe, Africa, The Caribbean islands, and North America. How it would work is Europe would send weapons such as guns and exchange them with African kings for slaves. Slaves would then be taken to the Caribbean and North America where they would be sold and made to work on cotton, sugar,  and tobacco farms. Boats would then taken those goods and being them to Europe. The Slave trade lasted between the 15th century to the 16th century and was finally abolished in 1807. Of course the keeping of slaves was still allowed but the the trade circuit was abolished. The reason it wasn't abolished until 1807 was because that was the year of what historians consider the first mass public protest. Of course there had been protests but on a more smaller, personal scale such as having abortions or committing suicide. There were also groups such as Sons of Africa who began a letter writing campaign against the slave trade. 

Creative writing reflection

For the past two weeks in English we've been exploring and learning about different types of creative writing.  We did this for preparation for our creative writing topic this term alongside reading Shakespeare's Macbeth. To start off we talked about what makes good creative writing and came up with things such as an interesting plot, plot continuity, three dimensional characters, writing that flows, variety of sentence lengths, etc. We then completed a matrix of five activities that involved writing haikus, reviewing slam poetry, writing our own sensory language piece, learning about types of language affects, and writing our own metaphors and similes.

What did I learn?
I learnt about types of language affects (in particular allusion and anaphora) and how to use them in my writing. I also learnt about sensory language (which I didn't know had  a name) and got to write my own. I struggled a bit about what to write and how to write it, make it sound nice, and make it actually make sense.

What I found in particular to be enjoyable
I really enjoyed the haiku activity and the sensory language. I enjoy describing things in writing and creating a picture in the readers mind so haikus and sensory language were really fun and interesting to do.

All the posts involved in this activity
Haikus + extras

Sensory Language

Language affects (Allusion and Anaphora)

Metaphors and Similes

Slam poetry

Haikus

                   

Chicken and rice muffins and what we learnt in home economics.

Last Friday my home economics class had our first practical. Below is the recipe that we used to cook chicken and rice patties/breakfast muffins.

Ingredients 

• 2 cups of jasmine rice
• 1 chicken breast
• 1/2 Tbsp of olive oil
• 1/2 a large carrot
• 3/4 cups of grated cheese
• 2 spring onion stalks
• 1-2 eggs

Method

1. Preheat oven to 200 C and set your rice to cook.
2. Slice chicken in half width way. This causes the chicken to cook faster.
3. Heat oil in medium heated pan. Proceed to cook chicken in pan. Once brown remove chicken from pan and shred with fork.
4. Grate carrot and finely cut your spring onion.
5.  Lightly beat your eggs then add carrots, spring onions, eggs, cooked rice, chicken, and cheese to a large bowl.
6. Spray muffin trays with cooking spray and proceed to spoon mixture into tin.
7. Sprinkle a bit of cheese on top and then cook for 15 minutes.
8.  Once finished remove from oven and let stand for a couple of minutes.

Tips for food safety

• Use the correct cutting boards for food to prevent cross contamination. Colored boards are yellow = chicken, red = red meat, green = vegetables and fruit, 
• Wash your hands and under your fingernails before you begin.
• If you are defrosting chicken for this recipe, then defrost the chicken in the fridge. While this doesn't stop bacteria from growing and multiplying it does slow it down.
• Clean your work space before placing food on the surface.

Reflection

Our first practical was fairly easy as the rice and chicken were already cooked and ready to go. This meant that all we had to do was a little bit of mise en place. Mise en place is a french word meaning "putting in place". In a professional setting mise en place is used to describe the preparation of food before you begin cooking. We had to prepare the vegetables, cheese, eggs, and then mix everything together. We also had to change the recipe as the original rice needed to be halved (which is the recipe above), and we changed how we were originally going to cut the chicken. We were going to cut horizontally and instead just sliced it in half. I really enjoyed this practical but I do hope that the next one is a little more harder.

The good things 

Some of the things that went well was our time management. When we finished we actually had a decent amount of time left. I also think that my group worked together really well and the class as a whole was behaving well and paying attention to the teacher. The patties/bruffins were also really nice.

The bad things

The only things that went wrong was the fact that some groups were a little bit messy and had trouble tidying up. Fortunately a lot of people had finished cleaning up early and were able to lend a hand.

Overall

Overall I really enjoyed this practical. I like how you can change ingredients out for something else i.e switching the carrot out for mushrooms or the chicken with for fish. Next time I'll probably add some more herbs and spices just so it doesn't taste as bland. I'll also probably have it with a nice sauce/relish i.e capsicum relish or sweet chili sauce (which I heard is very nice with this recipe). Overall I thought this practical went very well and I'm excited for the next one.  

Heart attacks (not the lovey dovey kind)

The heart is a critical piece of the body as it pumps blood into the body and lungs. Unfortunately the body has to make things difficult by giving us heart attacks. If you don't know what a heart attack is when something is stopping blood from flowing through coronary artery such as a blockage or narrowing of the artery. This causes a blood clot to begin forming which will prevent blood and oxygen flowing and result in either the damage or death of the heart muscle. You can also have a heart attack due to a tear in the coronary artery, small blood clots, fat particles from other parts of the body, or when the blood in general is reduced such as when the body goes into shock from trauma, heatstroke, or blood loss. Risk factors include age, genetics, smoking, high blood pressure,  high blood cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, physical in-activeness, and stress.

Symptoms
Symptoms of a heart attack include nausea, shortness of breath, sweating/cold sweat,
feeling faint/dizzy, feeling of impending doom, weakness or tiredness, and commonly pain in the left arm such as tightness, pressure, aching or a burning sensation.
How to prevent one
There are multiple ways to prevent the chance of a heart attack which are mainly doing the
opposite of what causes a heart attack, so things such as staying active, eat healthy, limit alcohol intake, maintain a reasonable weight for your age/height group,  avoid over stressing yourself, manage diabetes, stay updated on blood pressure, and another way is to actually sleep instead of binge watching the umbrella academy on netflix.

What treatment is there?

There are a variety of treatments that are available to victims of heart attacks, such as aspirin, thrombolytics (dissolve blood clots), anitplatelet agents (prevent clots from becoming larger), pain relievers, nitroglycerin (widens blood vessels), beta blockers (relax heart muscles and decreases blood pressure which makes the heart's job easier), ACE inhibitors (reduce stress on the heart), and Statins (control blood cholesterol). There's also surgeries such as Coronary angioplasty and stenting, which includes sting a tube up your wrist or groin to a blocked artery, once there they inflate a small balloon and expand a metal casing which will cause the artery to remain open either temporarily or long-term. There is also coronary artery bypass surgery which involves sewing your veins/arteries in place beyond a blocked/narrow artery which will then allow blood to flow through easily.