Week 7 - Food = Love

This week for me was all about the Terry Fox Challenge.  Our school has a goal to raise $1000 for the Terry Fox foundation.  At the beginning of the week we were sitting around $515 or something like that.  Not too bad, about half way there, but we only had the rest of the week to get it done!  During our fire gathering the week before, one of my students asked me if I could help their class organize a movie night.  I thought it would be fun so I agreed.  Besides, I had the added bonus that if we managed to raise at least $450 then Gillian would be getting her hair cut into a mullet for the challenge :)

Evidently I should have thought things through since planning the movie night actually requires a significant amount of work.  After school for Tuesday-Thursday I stayed after school to help make our goods for the canteen.  The kids were a fantastic help though and they were there after school with me everyday.  Not always the same ones, but there was always plenty of help to go around.

We even managed to get some free child labor.  Here's a picture of Nikita's little one giving her mom a helping hand!

I think we managed to make 100 and something bags of popcorn and around 150 cookies.  We ended up selling cookies, popcorn, yogurt tubes and juice boxes.  The main event was on Thursday night.  From 7-9 was Cars 2 for the Primary kids and 9-11 was Captain America for the Secondary kids.  It seems odd to me, but we actually managed to sell more movie tickets and food to the Primaries than to the Secondaries.  We set up everything in the Agora which actually worked out perfectly!

All in all the movie night was a great success! Fueled by the incentive to get Gillian her mullet our class managed to raise a whopping $695.  Given the additional donations our school is currently sitting past $1300!  Our goal was to beat last years amount.  Heather also organized a dance for Friday night, so I am excited to see how much money they were able to raise.

On Thursday I had a double period with one of my Science classes.  Since we just finished our unit on Chemical and Physical changes I thought I would take them to the kitchen for a more practical lesson.  We made pretzels and the kids had a short worksheet to complete that tested their ability to recognize what sort of changes were occurring at different stages in the process.  This worked out very well and the kids managed to correctly identify the type of change that was occurring.  From my experiences throughout the week I have noticed that the kids tend to work a lot better when food is involved.  The other thing I noticed is that you are able to build a much better rapport with the kids when they see you as something other than that guy who bugs them to do work all the time.  I had a great time working with the kids after school, I just wish I could get them to work that hard IN the classroom.

The last thing I did this week was make a Birthday Cake for Mark's birthday.  Nancy wanted to have a little get together for him and I asked her if she would like a cake.  For a change I didn't have to worry about nut allergies!!! She said that he really likes Maple and Walnuts so I made just a regular Genoese Sponge cake.  I candied some Walnuts and added some maple syrup to the resulting Walnut infused sugar syrup to make it a maple walnut sugar syrup.  This delicious liquid was then used to moisten the dry as dust cake.  Afterwards I made a Maple flavoured Italian buttercream.  Everyone enjoyed it and I was happy to make it! I enjoy being able to exercise my creativity and I wasn't rushed in doing it either.  To be honest it has actually been around 2 years since I've made this sponge recipe so I'm happy that it actually turned out properly (aside from the fact that I didn't like my pan with parchment and the cake stuck to the pan very severely).

Well, my piping and chocolate writing needs a little work...but overall I was satisfied with the end product.  Nancy swears I could make a killing off of selling my baked goods.  Too much work for me, but if someone else wants to try it I am more than happy to give them some lessons!