Samoan Language Week

Talofa lava! This week is Samoan Language Week. We have been doing some activities relating to Samoan culture. On Monday and Tuesday we read a book about making siapo (tapa) and found out how these very special textiles are made. We did some simple artworks based on some of the images we saw.

We decided to do some cooking inspired by Samoan recipes. We read a book about how Samoan people cook some food wrapped up in parcels. We found out that coconut is a very important ingredient in Samoan cooking. We decided to turn our vegetables for soup making into vegetable parcels with coconut milk. Traditionally these are wrapped in leaves, but we adapted and used foil to make parcels.

 The first job we had to do was to chop up the vegetables. We harvested some silver beet and parsley from the garden outside of our classroom too. We partly cooked the vegetables in the microwave, stirred in the coconut milk then made parcels using foil.

Fay was chief assistant chef for this project. Rawiri was very interested in the whole process.

Matthew spooned kumara into his parcel.

He added some carrots and silver beet.

Aimee-Lee thought pumpkin would be good. William had music therapy with Jenny so he didn't do cooking. He is doing so well at music - we are really proud of him! He returned to class and had a sit down after all of the great work he did.

Kyle added pumpkin to his parcel.

Aimee-Lee added kumara. We bought orange kumara at the supermarket.

We bundled up our parcels to keep the steam in.

They were like little nests.

Here they are all wrapped up and ready to go in the oven:

After they were cooked for about 45 minutes they looked like this:

The vegetables were all cooked and there was a delicious coconut sauce in the bottom. Yummy! Rawiri took one look and said "No!" but then he had a taste and decided "Yes please!".

Aimee-Lee's vegetable parcel looked so good and she ate everything.

Kyle is not a huge vegetable fan, but he tasted the different vegetables. Well done Kyle.

Matthew didn't seem to know what to think of food in a foil parcel, but he did think the veges were very delicious.

We made a parcel for William, but he had a look and decided not to test the vegetables. We will keep them for tomorrow.

We can highly recommend this technique for cooking vegetables. Samoan people also cook fish in parcels. We thought adding some curry paste to the coconut milk would liven things up a bit too, and then you'd have an Indian or Asian inspired creation.

In the morning we discussed how coconuts are harvested, and watched a video of someone climbing a tree and harvesting coconuts. Matthew also watched a fun video of a man finding a lizard in a coconut tree. He is our class expert on animals. We didn't have to climb a tree to find a coconut because we bought one from the supermarket. Sadly it didn't come with a lizard.

Fay tried to use a few different tools to get into the eyes of the coconut. We could hear the coconut water swishing around inside and wanted to get it out without making a big mess.

Finally a screwdriver turned out to be perfect. There was a little hissing sound when we got into the inside part of the coconut.

Look at what came out:

 We tried the coconut water and most of us liked it.

Then we got to the main event. Rawiri had a go at getting into the coconut.

Then Kyle gave it a few good whacks with the hammer.

And Rawiri went tap, tap, tap to open the cracks up.

 Everyone crowded around to see what was inside the coconut.

 Yes, it was fun finding out what was inside the rough, brown coconut, but it was even better getting to taste it. William, Rawiri and Aimee-Lee loved the coconut. Kyle wasn't quite sure whether it was good or bad, and Matthew wasn't impressed. He is used to his mum's wonderful cooking.

We have had a lot of fun with one coconut, a screwdriver and a hammer. I wonder what we will find out about next week?