Basketball - Students vs. Teachers

Last Wednesday, the students and the teachers were competing against each other in basketball. Students were composed of two teams and teachers of 1. Teachers were playing very hard as they had to be on the court for the whole time. They only had a break after their 4th game against students, from which after the two teams of students played against each other. The students won with a high score against the teachers. The games were all tense. Everybody was running around and doing their best for their team to succeed. All the tricks and techniques learned during the winter were used in this tournament. Everybody has been improving a lot since their first attending to the club. Including me. Frankly, I think that my performance on last Wednesday was my personal best so far at the basketball club. I managed to score around four baskets and I managed to keep up with the team play which was a great success from all of the members of our team (Måns, Daniel, Francesco and Elvijs). I was playing in the front right. Next week we will have a rematch against the teachers. For this Wednesday our team should have a clear strategy what to follow, however the one that we improvised last week wasn't bad at all.

School 9 Art fare

Last Tuesday, some of the year twelves went to school 9 for an art fare. Year twelves were asked to organise fun art related activities for kids. This was done in pairs and two pairs were always in one class room, so that while the other pair was running their activity the other pair could have a small brake or help with the activity. The art fare lasted for around 4,5 hours.

I was doing an activity with Måns. Every group had over all two classes to whom an activity was organised. Me and Måns organised an activity where the students had to draw on an A4 piece of paper that was folded into 4 parts. Each of the parts was supposed to have a different body part of a human figure drawn on it and therefore 4 students were asked to sit on one table. The idea of the activity was that each student would draw one body part each on one of the folded parts in a way that when the next one who needs to draw the next body part will not see the previously drawn one. This was done so that when the complete figure was drawn, the outcome would be a funny surprise for everybody in the group. The activity didn't work out quite well with the first class because the kids didn't seem to understand the main idea of the activity. Some kids weren't passing the paper around after they had drawn the first body part (instead decided to draw the whole picture themselves) and some pictures weren't finished on time. However when we were running the same activity with the second class, everything went much better. We decided to put the kids to draw the body parts as a team, so that each team (out of 4) were drawing one body part at a time and when finished the paper was passed on to the next team. Sometimes the papers weren't folded well enough making the team members to see the previously drawn body part, however it didn't ruin the fun because in the end when the outcomes were revealed, the kids were laughing.Over all, the day went well, however it made everybody extremely tired. If we are to do this again, we should organise the activities more in detail, especially if there are young kids participating.

On Wednesday, some of the older kids from school 9 came to visit our school. This time me and Måns spend only one period with them. The activity that we set up for the kids was to draw own flip book animations. We encountered a bit trouble as the process of making the flip books took more time than was expected, so the class had to wait for a while. However in the end, all kids from the class had managed to draw nice flip book animations. The activity went over all well. If we are to do this activity again, we should make the flip books edges even so that they could be flipped more easily.

An example of a flip book animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAExZjcwydk

BaKeRy

Last Sunday was the partly international Mothers' Day, so me and my sister decided to bake raspberry white-chocolate cupcakes. Yummy :P We have a cooking book specialised on cupcake recipes. It's full of different varieties however as my sister had baked before exactly raspberry white-chocolate cupcakes, we decided to make them, because we had the required ingredients for them.

The recipe is quite simple, however as I almost never cook it was enough challenging. The ingredients are as follows (for around 12 cupcakes):

How they should look like

100 g butter
1 dl of milk
2 eggs
1,5 dl sugar
3,5 dl flour
1,5 teaspoonfull baking powder
2 teaspoonfull vanilla sugar
100 g white chocolate
100 g raspberries

Frosting:

0,5 dl whipping cream
1 tablespoonfull butter
100 g white-chocolate
(decoration requires fresh raspberries and chips of white-chocolate) 


First you do the frosting:

1.Whipping cream needs to be warmed almost until it boils in the pot.
2. Then you remove the pot from the stove and add the butter and white-chocolate in pieces.
3. Mix until it becomes flat and even and let it cool.

Then the pastry:

1.Melt the butter in the pot, add milk and leave it cool.
2.Froth the eggs and sugar in order that they become spongy lather and add the butter-milk mixture.
3. By this time you should have mixed the dry ingredients together. Then carefully add the groats or pieces of white-chocolate and mix them flat and even.
4. Insert the pastry into the cup cake leases and press a few raspberries inside each of them .
5. Bake them in the oven in 200 degrees for around 15 minutes.
6. Add the frosting on top of FULLY cooled cup cakes and decorate with raspberries and chips of chocolate.

   Book: Ihanat Kuppikakut
   Authors: Sanna Kiiski and Lee Ehnqvist

We tried to follow the recipe as much as we could though I had problems sometimes with the organisation in the kitchen as everything should be completed relatively fast. Alone it would've taken a lot more time than without help. I learned a new skill which was to bake cup cakes. It was the first time in my life but definitely not the last one. When I'll bake cup cakes for the next time I will try to do them alone and will definitely let them cool completely because this time we didn't let them cool enough which resulted the frosting to drip of from the lease and not spread out evenly. Also I might try make the cupcakes more flat like as the original picture shows. For the next time I'll make sure that there is plenty of fresh raspberries because this time we were lacking them and we had to use frozen ones but they were very good as well. However I'm very pleased with the taste because they were delicious (in my opinion). 

Here is the outcome:

M-M-MM.......