Tapa Mats and Hokey Pokey

This is what I made today. It was SO much fun. It’s called a tapa mat, and it’s very Pasifika. First we drew grid lines on our paper, drew the design in pencil, went over it in sharpie—which, by the way, they call “Skerples”—dyed the whole paper brown, and then bleached out the parts we wanted white. Far out project right? We talked about how this one project could be integrated with math (measurement, grid, rotation/translation/reflection, patterns), social studies (cultural patterns of Maori and Pasifika), science (chemical reaction of the bleach), etc. I wish our schools were more like this instead of so rigid and strict and focued on certain programs and assessment.

After school, Jess, Christine, Anna, and I experimented by making some hokey pokey cookies…they were interesting…haha. Phyllis didn’t like them, and I only liked them because I ate mine with hokey pokey ice cream and the actual hokey pokey we made. :) I guess making hokey pokey is a science experiment they often do in schools. All you have to do is boil 5 tablespoons of sugar, 2 tablespoons of golden syrup (which is very similar to molasses), and then after it boils add 1 teaspoon of baking soda. It gets frothy (similar to a vinegar and baking soda reaction), and then quickly hardens up like peanut brittle or caramel. It was delicious. I wonder if they have golden syrup in the states?

After dinner, we went and delivered our treats to Carol Anderton, our literacy teacher who lives just up the street. We ended up spending the rest of the evening chatting with her and her 20-year-old daughter, Natalie. It was such a fun time! We asked them a lot of questions we have all been wondering, and we planned a trip to visit Mt. Eden and a city tour of Auckland. We even got Natalie to attempt an American accent! It reminded me of that YouTube video of the Harry Potter cast “speaking American.” So funny.

Our night ended with a fun little convo of “do you have…?” with Sheryl. Sometimes I think she’s a jokingly offended when we ask her if they have certain things because she’ll respond with something like, “Of course we do! We’re not that barbaric!” Anyway she was going through some of her cookbooks asking us if we have cookies, or rather, biscuits like brandy snaps or gingernuts or ANZAC. It was an interesting little comparison to show just how similar and how different our desserts are. We now have plans to try many tasty New Zealand treats…YUM!