Middle Years B class did a design tech class where we used recycled materials to make a small play garden area for the babies and little kids in FaFT and Preschool.

First we looked on Pinterest for ideas and then we drew pictures of what we wanted our own pallets to look like. Next we wrote a list of the items that we wanted to look for. We went to the tip to collect all of the great items for recycling into our project. We brought the items back to school and painted them so that they would be interesting for the little kids to look at and play with.

Our Assistant Teacher, Jack, helped us to learn how to use the drill, and also the hammer and nails. We also built a new wheelbarrow without any teacher help by following the instructions in the booklet.

We are really proud of our play garden and the little kids love it.

Today is the second last day of Term 3 and we went out with the rangers for Learning on Country for the whole day today.

First we went to Gatji to collect rungan (paperbark) from the trees.

To collect the bark we use a long thin stick made of steel. We hit the tree with the steel stick to find out if the paperbark is thick enough. We can tell by the sound how thick or thin the bark is. When we find thick bark we use the stick to start breaking into the bark. We make a straight line down the tree and then we peel the bark off with our hands. The bark is light and soft.
After we have enough bark for sitting on and for wrapping our damper we load it into the truck.

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Next we went to Gnoymorridjapin to collect our cycad nuts that we have been soaking in the river since last week.
We have to soak the cycad nuts to let the poison leak out into the river so that they are safe to eat. We shake the bag and dunk it up and down before we take it out of the water. Once we take it out of the water we put the bag in the bucket and tip out the rest of the water. We squash the bag to push out more water and keep doing this until most of the water is gone. After that we tip the cycad nuts out of the bag and into the bucket.

The soaked cycad nuts smell like poo! But the damper tastes yummy once it is cooked. Just try not to smell it too much!

Next we have to compress the soaked nuts into balls and grind them on a rock to get all of the lumps out.

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We also collected mid mussels in the river while we were grinding the cycad nuts. We will cook them in the fire as well.

We made a large fire so that we could have a big pile of coals for cooking our damper.

To make the damper we spread some of the cycad nut liquid onto the bark. It’s like butter so that the damper doesn’t stick to the bark. Then we spread some of the flour onto the bark and wrap it up. We tie the park package with string that we made from balagurr trees. When the coals are nice and hot and thick we put the damper packages on the edge of the fire and cover them with the hot coals. The damper takes about an hour to cook in the small packages.

While we waited for our damper to cook we went exploring and did some fishing.

When our damper was ready we took it out of the fire and enjoyed eating our feast of hot bread.

This Friday we went out with the rangers and started preparing the cycad nuts that we collected last week. We learned how to crack them without crushing them. Some of us hit our fingers a few times and it hurt a bit, but we are okay and we got better at it the more we did it.
First we had to cut down some trees with a machete to make the sticks we needed to crack the nuts. Then we had to find a nice flat rock each for placing the nut on to hit it. We sat together and listened to stories told by Florence, Sylvia, and Elizabeth.
(Oh yeh… and we got a flat tyre on the way home, but our awesome teacher, Damon, fixed it while our other teacher, Kirra, took photos of him!)

 

Middle Years A class spent some time during term 2 studying soil types, rock types and how to grow seedlings. We spent a lot of time working at the CDP depot and started growing seedlings in the Food Ladder greenhouse. We grew herbs like thyme, oregano, mint, coriander, and basil, and we also grew some sunflowers.

We discovered that in Ramingining we have lots of clay in our soil and the rocks around here are all sedimentary rocks, which are mostly sandstone. We learnt about soil nutrients and why we use potting mix to grow seedlings.

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We have been learning how to slackline during some of our afternoon sessions. Slacklining if kind of like tightrope walking, but the rope isn’t a ‘tight’ cable, it’s a long piece of webbing that technically doesn’t get tight and always has a large sag when loaded. This means that when someone stands on it, it bends down and wobbles a lot making it really hard to walk along. We are practicing our skills and slowly getting better at it.

The three secrets to slacklining are:

1. Keep your eyes on the opposite end of the line right where it meets the tree.
2. Keep your arms wide and high.
3. Keep your feet facing forwards, not sideways.

What we’ve been up to in Term 3, 2018

We have teamed up with the ASRAC rangers in Ramingining who have been teaching us some useful skills like hunting for maypal (seashore creatures), spear making, collecting paperbark, making shelters, and collecting and using cycad nuts.

We go out on country every second Friday, and in between we have lessons at school where we focus on learning the yolngu language associated with our previous Learning on Country trip. In future we will try to post every week about what we have been doing.

Check out the photos below to see what we’ve been doing out and about around Ramingining area. (Scroll over photos for captions or click on them to see full screen)