Fourth Of July Fun! by Eleanor

I am back again, again! I have read "Bo At Ballard Creek" for the second time. It was very fun. 

My favourite chapter is called "The Fourth Of July." The main character in the book is Bo. her family isn't a family like your regular old family, she has two Daddys who she calls Papa and Papa. They're not a gay family, Jack and Arvid are work partners who work together and decided to raise Bo together. Bo's mommy walked away, kind of like a turtle who walks away from her turtle babies or turtle eggs.

The book is set in Alaska after the gold rush, in the late 1920's. They always have bannock and donuts on the Fourth of July, because the 4th of July is America's birthday. Yay, America! The whole town used to make the celebration happen. There was no committee or anything that would bring the food, everybody brought their share. They brought their share, they got their share! Bo's Papa Jack was great cook and he used to make 400 donuts and bring them in a wheel barrow!

We made donuts and bannock with my Dad. it was great fun, but my Dad accidentally deleted all the pictures. Just imagine the pictures of me and my Mum and Dad and Sophia and Amy cooking bannock over a campfire. We made bannock like the picture above here. This is how you make bannock, first you make the dough and if you want to put in different flavours you add things. we made berry bannock, fancy cheese and rosemary bannock and regular bannock. The reason they had bannock is because there was a large Inuit community in Ballard Creek. 

We twisted it into ropes, and wrapped it around sticks like the picture above, and we cooked it over a fire.  I loved it! Then we also made donuts and it was really fun, but our house STANK from the smell of the hot fat (or lard) we cooked them in.

We made little circles with cups out of dough and poked our fingers through to make holes and then our Daddy plopped them in the hot lard. You had to get the oil at just the right temperature, so the outside didn't burn but the inside was still cooked. The first few donuts weren't perfect but they were edible, and delicious.  The amazing scientific thing that happened was that the dough was so flat at first, and all of a sudden, POOF! it was nice and thick. The donuts would also start to float when they were ready to turn over. After they were cooked we let them dry for a while and then we put them in a paper bag of powdered sugar and shook them up so they were covered in powdered sugar. (I honestly liked them better without the sugar.)

Thank you for listening, I suggest making donuts and bannock yourself, and reading this book. They are very good! Bye!

Making Beautiful Things Out Of Dust

Two weeks ago when we met, we learned about Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day where we remember what Adoph Hitler did and all of the jews and all of the people who were in concentration camps, and many people died. 6 million Jewish people died, and over 5 million other people who were gay and lesbian, gypsies, people who had dark skin and people who opposed Hitler were all taken from their homes and put into concentration camps and many of them died.

It was bad. It was sorrowful time when many lives came to an end. Thankfully we can learn about this so that we can learn about this so we can recognize not to do things like this again.

One of the things we learned was that at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC there are thousands of ceramic tiles made by children who wanted to remember the Holocaust. We made our own memorial tiles out of salt dough.

Insert pictures of tiles here.


Today, when we met, we were studying different kinds of poetry. We listened and looked at poems by e e cummings, W.H. Auden and Rudyard Kipling, Shel Silverstein and A.A. Milne. We each took a favourite book of poetry and chose poems to read aloud.

Eleanor reads from A Light In The Attic by Shel Silverstein

Miranda reads from Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

Sophia reads from Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne

We also talked about different forms of poetry. Sophia shared some haiku she had written when she was reflecting on a poster for some summer soccer, music and arts camps she had seen:

Music

Notes slur together
Kickdrums and snares keep the time.
This is our music. 

Soccer
Feet pounding in hope.
We know this is our game now.
Victory in view. 

Art
A dip in the pot.
Two strokes on a canvas page.
A new masterpiece. 

We spent some time learning about the poetry form of the cinquain. A cinquain is a five-line poem and it starts with a noun, then 2 adjectives, then three words ending with -ING, then a four word phrase and then a synonym for the first word (your topic). We then spent some time together on how we felt when we learned about the Holocaust two weeks before. We had been reflecting during the morning on how a poem can paint a picture in our minds with just a few words, or how poetry can convey sadness, anger or humour and fun. We spent some time brainstorming ideas from our recollections.  These are the cinquains that the three of us (Miranda, Sophia and Eleanor) wrote together.

Soldier
Brave, courageous
Hoping, caring, wanting
Fighting for their rights
Warrior.

Holocaust
Horrible devastation
Killing, stopping, hating
Lives frozen in time
Lost

Remembrance
Vivid nightmare
Learning, weeping, staying
We say never again
Recollection