Monthly Archives: February 2013

Pudding club: lemon posset with lemon shortbread

A rare occurrence – a term time pudding club – made possible because of a training day.

I made lemon posset with lemon shortbread, and we also took over one of P’s award-winning chocolate cakes.

Whilst the shortbread was a wee bit fiddly – and not properly cooked in the event – the posset is an incredibly simple but effective dessert. Three ingredients, made in less than five minutes, allowed to cool and then a few hours in the fridge. Yields a complex and tangy taste that is super delicious. A pint of cream yielded 7 filled reused gü pots.

Wikipedia reveals that whilst these days, a posset is a cold dessert, it was originally a warm drink of hot milk curdled by adding wine or ale. Hmmm, hot, curdled beery milk. Delicious!

Cartoons for feedback #mfltwitterati

I’m planning a series of lessons feeding back on performance from recent assessments, and I’m wondering about how to get my students to pay attention to what I say.

I read a recent blogpost (but didn’t save the link, sorry!) that suggested cartoons might be a fun way to do it.

After a bit of googling, I’ve spent half an hour on ToonDoo creating a series of fun ways of looking at National Curriculum levels.

Level 4 in MFL ii

This is turning into a series of worksheets! Shout if you want me to share the completed work.

NB the “Check the box for examples” is so that I can do one set of cartoons for both languages. I can lay these onto an A4 sheet and then amend the surrounding boxes.

Here are two PDFs – one for L3 and on the second page for L4.

I’ve also created a CORN display – I now have a CORNwall in my classroom. Here is the Word document of the words I have up now.

I’ve twinned my toilet!

A few months ago, I stumbled across an interesting charity that helps communities without sanitation build better loos. It has an arresting premise that you can “twin your toilet” – and I liked the concept so much I filed it away for a day when I might be able to afford to take part.

That day has come, and today P hiked to the Royal Mail depot to pick up the parcel that contained our framed certificate with details of which toilet we are twinned with. The cert. includes latitude and longitude (11.03783, 105.65613) and with the magic of Google Maps we can see where in the world we are talking about.

Our toilet twin is in Cambodia, not far from the Vietnamese border. Not a part of the world I know much about, and I had to zoom out an awful lot before I finally saw a place name I had heard of before. (Bangkok!)

The toilet twinning website gives all sorts of fascinating and disturbing reasons why it’s important that toilets are improved wherever possible:

It’s out of order! 1 in 3 people across the world don’t have somewhere safe to go to the toilet. Bad sanitation is one of the world’s biggest killers: it hits women, children, old and sick people hardest. Every minute, three children under the age of five die because of dirty water and poor sanitation. And, right this minute, around half the people in the world have an illness caused by bad sanitation.

And why it’s also done in a community minded way – it’s apparently no good showing up and building a latrine without teaching the people it’s for what it does!

[The Village Education Resource Centre] realised that a band of khaki-clad aid workers pitching up in a community with a 4×4, a load of spades and materials for building loos – did not constitute a successful sanitation programme – because the community were left with a strange looking building that they didn’t know what to do with. In a straight contest between the “it-came-from-out-of-nowhere-latrine”, and the local river – the river won: on the premise of “better the devil you know”

Twin your toilet today!