Week 2 of Term 4 has flown. It was a good week. All four of my classes are preparing for Yearly Exams - which for two of the classes (7 and 8) involves testing them on the material that they learned over the course of the whole year. My Year 9 and 10 classes are working on a couple of fun assessment tasks. My Year 10s are working on one that involves exploring Australian popular culture and how it has influenced pop culture internationally. I have learned pretty quick that this is a ridiculous topic for me to be teaching. Not only am I not Australian, so I have no idea about Aussie pop culture (really, that is something you can only know by living here for a while) but I also haven't had TV (cable) in a couple decades (when I did have it, I was in Germany and we watched British channels like Sky One or military channels like AFN - so I definitely am not in tune with 'normal' pop culture even from the States.) I've also been influenced by my parent's music taste and so don't follow any modern bands or singers. So my Year 10s are having a great time being the 'experts' while I help them as best as I can research for their task.
My Year 9s are doing a cool assessment where they have to compare the change in population between an Aussie city and an Asian city over the last 100 years. I was beyond excited to have found a file that you can upload to Google Earth (they are called KMZ files) where population data was displayed through bar graphs across the entire Google Earth Globe. If you want to try it out on your own computer just click this link and once it downloads and you open it, Google Earth will open with the file's data embedded. It's cool stuff and I was really excited to be able to share it with the HSIE staff so that they could use it with their classes. Google Earth presentation, including timeline and bar charts for individual cities (kmz, 2 MB) Our family had a long 4 day weekend this weekend as I took Friday and Monday off. We went to the Warrumbungle National Park, which is a place we stopped over for just a night back during our winter break. I had a feeling when I was there last that I would love it in warmer weather and with more time to explore and I wasn't wrong. I feel like I need a bumper sticker like the "I heart the Chugach" bumper stickers in Alaska, but it should say "I heart the Warrumbungles." We had three days there and to make it better, our Polish friends Ola, Niko, and Luke joined us. The first night it poured - our first night of serious rain in all our nights camping in Australia. We grilled at the covered BBQ area for dinner and chatted over wine under their canopy while the kids slept snug in their tents with the pattering of rain lulling them to sleep. The morning came with blue skies and sun and we all took off on a great hike. Really it is up there as one of my most favorite hikes that we've been on so for on Australia. We all walked together for about 5 km, and then Luke, Niko, and Tom turned back while Ola, Olin, Alta and I finished the 14.5 km loop. It is the longest hike my kids have gone on - even in all their Alaskan hikes - and I was so proud of them. We were cruising. The Warrumbungles is an ancient extinct volcano who's magma solidified inside the mountain in columns. Through the millions of years, the mountain around the columns eroded away to leave these pillars of magma scattered around the land. Kangaroo are plentiful and the screeching sulphur crested cockatoos and the prehistoric landscape make for the scene of dinosaur movie. We had so much fun hanging out with our friends and are really going to miss them when we leave. They have been teaching us words in Polish: yes, no, radish. We are also really enjoying being with people that are foreigners to Australia and that come from an area in Europe that Tom and I spent so much time in. We are familiar with the same flowers that people use in their flower boxes back in Germany and Poland. At one point, Ola's tee-light went out and I tried to get it out of the glass that it was in to relight it. I spilled wax all over the glass and apologized. She said that it was no big deal because it was an old mustard glass. "Hey!" I said. "My parents use old mustard glasses as water glasses!" For those of you that are reading this that have lived in central Europe (Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Poland) you'll probably recognize what I'm talking about. I love it. Being with them is like being home in Germany. On Saturday night we booked a session at the Milroy Observatory where the world's largest public telescope is housed. Saturn. We saw Saturn. It was amazing!!! We also saw a dead star, and a star cluster that was 8,000 light years away. I love the sky here in Australia, and looking through that telescope was like kissing the sky! (I know that sounds kind-of dorky, but the exhilaration was the same.) Sound bites: 1. Luke and Ola made us our first real English breakfast (they used to live in England). Eggs, ham, and beans! 2. On our way home from camping, about two blocks from our house (by the Private Hospital for anyone who knows the neighborhood), we passed a man trying to help an echidna across the road. We don't live in the wilderness, so seeing an echidna cross the road here is definitely something noteworthy! 3. Olin and I spent our morning drinking coffee (me) and cocoa (him) next to a small camp fire with the magma pillars stretching into beautiful morning blue skies and kangaroo grazing on the fresh Spring grass around us. 4. "Heh. That red ant and that green ant were fighting over a bee's butt." - Alta while on a hike 5. "Mom look. A cockroach's head without the body. And it is still alive!" - Alta while on a different hike 6. We learned to find the Scorpio constellation and I really do wish it was visible in the Northern Hemisphere. It is just really neat to see in the sky and you use it to find Saturn, which makes it even cooler. 7. While looking in the telescope at Saturn, a shooting star crossed my field of vision. Guess that doesn't happen very often! 8. Tom is getting some little green tomatoes on his patio garden tomato plant. 9. My parents are coming Thursday of this week! Olin and Alta don't know yet. It's a surprise. 10. I hit a kangaroo with the car. Enjoy the pics. Ola took some good ones on our hike, so I'll try to post them when I get copies.
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AuthorThe Liljemark's enjoy exploring the world. This blog chronicles our adventures. Archives
December 2017
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