We have been doing a sort of project called Eat Around the World (EATW). We’ve done a few other countries than Australia, the most recent one and the main gist of this post. We did a country off the border of England called Wales, and Indonesia, a group of large islands just above Australia. The reason of the project was so that every week (it never really worked out every week, but we’ve managed three countries) we learn about a specific country by picking a documentary and eating the foods from that place. I think Australia was the best choice, for it’s such a large country with so many interesting facts and islands and everything!
I’m going to start off with a few intriguing facts I’ve learned from the websites and television things we’ve looked at. Australia is the the biggest country in Australasia. The huge country also holds the Great Barrier Reef, a gigantic stretch of coral sea which lies over the north-east coast. It’s the largest living structure in the world! David Attenborough has made plenty of documentaries on it, which are really great. He goes into a large tank under the sea, really deep, where there is so much beautiful coral! I discovered that there are a load of amazing fish and sharks there. It’s so amazing! We painted the a bit of it:
There are loads of deadly animals in Australia. Spiders are common – but not just ordinary, harmless spiders! There are members of the widow families there, one of which is a red back spider. It looks just like a miniature black widow, with its hourglass red shape on its back. In Australia there are also crabs and crocodiles – and snakes, too, great big venomous ones! A map was shown about each deadly animal on our television, and it showed where they all were spread across Australia. At the beginning, we thought it would be fine to go on holiday if we went south, where they didn’t seem to be anything deadly. But then we realised – snakes – so many snakes! There were loads of ones in the south. They were all venomous, and make you paralysed and often you would die. It was terrible! Mummy said you’d have to tip up your shoes before you put them on and that sort of thing in case there was a deadly spider.
We’ve got a huge board on the wall in the dining room, where we make a huge project thing about the EATW country. I think our Australia one has been the biggest. Often we needed to blu-tac the pages and pictures off the board on the wall, because it was so packed! Once Tilly forgot not to write on the back of her A4 sheet, but she got carried away and wrote on it, so nobody can see the back because it’s on the wall! I find our EATW really fascinating.
Aborigines used to (and still do) live in Australia. They were the first people to find it about 40,000 years ago. Now they mainly live in what is now called the Outback, which is the middle of the country where it’s all boiling heat and sand. They do art just like us, but they get their paints from rocks, so they’re natural brown and dirty cream colours. They do what is known as ‘dot art’ where you paint natural lizards and kangaroos and this, that, and the other in circles and dots. I tried doing some myself with Tilly and Mummy. It’s actually quite painstaking and really hard! We managed though.
