As ready as I’m going to get anyway. Cleaning and laminating at school consumed much of the day. All the important stuff is done and the room is now clean and tidy, awaiting a tornado of students. Tomorrow I become one of the new most import people in 28 children’s lives for the next 11 months.
Tonight I have been playing with this auto colouring tool. Which produces spectacularly weird results. Note that in the image below I only gave it eye colour to work with for the Vodyanoi on the right.
Lots of typography work over the last couple of days making word wall headers, name labels and drawer labels to suit my needs. As well as some general teaching aides for the smooth functioning of my room:
Last thing to share today is this Bonobo clip that I have revisited twice now. It really is just supurb.
A hectic couple of days with late nights and early mornings. N’s new computer arrived as two large boxes and required assembly, which along with software installation took the better part of two evenings. It has now been running smoothly with steady uptime now exceeding exceeding twenty-four hours. With thanks to the gods of technology
There were two hiccups during setup. The first when we went to turn it on for the very first time and nothing happened. It was apparently only a cable that needed taken out and put back in again but my oh my it gave me a fright. Then a genuine and still unexplained peculiarity, during driver installations the screen took on a bright magenta hue and could not be convinced to change back, despite many settings tweaks and restarts, the loading screens were coloured normally, only windows was pink. Anyway changing graphics cable types solved the issue and since then it has all gone swimmingly.
In addition I’ve had two extremely busy days of PD and preparation and I’ve spent every spare moment from those tasks creating more classroom resources now that I finally have my class lists.
A free worksheet for any who are interested is included below. Heraldry and fantasy elements are all tying in as I’ll be using Classcraft as my central reward system this year, I’m even going so far as to pay for it and split the fee with another teacher.
Speaking of fantasy elements, I haven’t made time to work on L’s costume in a week but I also haven’t shown the most recent addition. Cut from a 3 ply block of 12mm foam the blade edge is actually 12mm wide. There are two very fiberglass rods providing core strength. Lots of sanding and detailing to go. Painting of the whole costume is within reach now.
Back at work. The classroom is coming together. Mandatory online trainings are complete and planning is progressing.
Still cleaning my classroom which had a fair bit of teacher and student detritus and disorganised cupboards. Also whipping up a few more classroom elements; today word wall headings and bookwork layout guide posters. One of which I may need to remake at some point. For now finished is better than perfect.
We watched Doctor Strange last night, which is fun even for one who has never read a single issue of his storyline. As with all recent Marvel’s it is more than a little bit silly, ultimately predictable and incredibly visually impressive. It would honestly have been extraordinary in 3D.
Foam work and time line labels ate the productive hours today. Only three elements and a little glue required to be ready for painting now. What a relief it will be to have that project complete. The elements remaining are the cloak attachments and the sword and shield, principle pieces for which are now all cut. I am way behind on build videos and going to devote some time to trying to finish one tonight.
I had a question about the time line I’ve been making and I guess I have not explained the project very well so far. A time line is a pretty indispensable teaching tool and pretty much every classroom needs one. In the past I have bodged up something similar, but without as much detail or orderliness as this new one. Typically a class room time line is used to order a small portion of events around a specific topic like the ‘Gold Rush’ or ‘Ancient Rome’. I have always found such time lines inadequate, they don’t have room for broader consequences or causes and they rarely give a contextual relationship to the students lifetime. This project is an attempt to create a timeline that includes at the start a whole bunch of critical events and dates as well as the lifetimes of a great number of famous historical figures.
My time line will be 14m long and will stretch across the whole wall above my whiteboard and around the corner slightly at each end. It will use a log scaling to allow inclusion of the big bang at the left end and one hundred years in the future at the right. It will have 1m for this year, to the left and right of this year 1m for ten years in the past and future. Beyond them another meter to the left and right for the 100 years before and beyond that. After that it extends only left each meter a length of time ten times the previous. Most of the final meter is unnecessary as the Big bang will be right at the right edge of that frame but it wont fit otherwise.
Today I added another twenty or so name and event labels and then began the odious task of transferring all I’ve made so far into Indesign as Illustrator was beginning to have serious difficulty with the file size.
Preparing for the term ahead by sorting, repacking and cleaning each area of the house systematically. Today emphasis was on our front storage room which had, due to repeated rummagings by both myself and the boys, deteriorated. Also contended with laundry and toys throughout the house. A good start, but the Shed/ Laundry, mud room, back porch and study all remain. In addition to some yard maintenance and mucking out the hen house.
The heat as always lately was intense, so we hid for a time in the aircon and I took the time to work on timeline labels, the number of which is now well and truly out of hand. Repairing a number of items of clothing and a faulty door lock. Also a couple of new classroom posters:
Ready for lamination. I have others waiting for access to a colour printer.
Brutally hot day and the pool was shut for a memorial service. Terrific storm this evening has washed the heat away, likely to be worse tomorrow though.
Made my classroom time line and labels to laminate and attach to it.
I began setting up and cleaning my classroom in earnest today. Which also afforded me opportunity to make my first prints on the schools 3D Printer. There remains a lot to do. But I have a space arraignment that I am happy with for now and I’ve found some treasures hidden in the cupboards, a couple of powered microscopes, lots of paint and dice. Happy days.
I won’t have students until Feb 6th as I’m in NSW’s western district. Work officially starts the Wednesday prior but that is professional development. I have planning and decorating to do.
Also finished attaching the pvc scale armour pieces to L’s Sir Vader tabard. A few foam details; Including a cloak attachment, a sword and shield and we are all set for painting and calling this particular project done.
New year, new classroom, now stripped of posters and decorations ready to make my own. I now also have a better handle on my planning requirements and suffice to say I have a great deal of work to do. Classroom layout is already developing and I have a number of classroom resources to create in addition to mountains of lesson plans. First among which is a logarithmic time line based on this and this and evolving from my previous classroom time lines that used similar principles but less formally.
This image perfectly captures why Wait But Why is both such an amazing teaching resource and completely unsuitable for use in my classrooms. And no I will not be including the heat death of the universe in my primary school classroom time line.
Daily or at least, near daily blogging is eating up a lot of my creative energy. So apart from the occasional verbose rant I am paring back my posting, back to the original intent; a keeping a public check on my creative progress. In particular I am changing the order of the evening and prioritising painting and drawing over post writing with the hope that I can post progress at the end of the evening rather than as has often happened lately accomplished little after writing a post until ten.
N and I started an online parenting course together this evening as we have both been looking for ways to foster resilience and compassion in our sons. So far it is good, the presenter knows her stuff and her activities are meaningful, if to our taste a little naff. Already I am looking at ways I can apply what we are learning in my classroom so there is definitely substance to the methods.
Somewhere in a photo album there is a photo of a a 6 or 7 year old me dressed in stonewash and a loud 80’s shirt standing proud as punch with a bright red and orange BMX in front of my mothers house in Balmain. This house:
Photo snapped by my good friend Steven Kiernan on the way back from dinner a few nights ago.
That bike granted me freedom. A great deal of freedom. Much as the cop in ‘Stranger Things’ describes it; ‘A bike Like that is a Cadillac to these kids’. With it I had freedom of the neighborhood and I used it. The most common journey for me was of course the seemingly epic ride to my school of the time. This weekend I decided to see just how far that really was. As it turns out it was only 800m and often done in company but often as not alone or on foot. The route I most often took is plotted below.
800m of freedom. Also of note at the time Mort Bay park was a derelict and forbidden wonderland that I was furiously lectured for exploring more than once.
That journey is illegal now. Until the age of ten NSW children are apparently unable to even cross the road without assistance and police have been known to threaten DOCS involvement for independent children even when crossing a road is not required.
I was lucky then and lucky as a teacher at West End, my year four class of two years ago repeatedly won the ‘Golden Boot’ award for active travel with 100% of students walking, riding, Public transporting or Park and Striding (Driven but dropped off 500m distant). That is a rare thing and a credit to the West End public community. But only a handful traveled truly independently. I have also lived on the main access street for one of Brisbane’s most prestigious private boys schools and the twice daily traffic jam of furious, stressed and ultimately dangerously driven luxury vehicles is memorable by comparison. Self reliance is not a skill that gets magically switched on at eighteen, it takes years and experience to develop. Only by giving children the trust to find their own limits and learn their confidence in their own abilities can it blossom. I believe walking to and from school independently is one of the safest and best ways for children to develop resilience and self reliance.
We are looking to live in a town/ village or community where children still play outside and where trusting children is normal. Such places do still exists but they are rare.
I would really like to see some more examples of others childhood walking journeys.
Not for competition mind,
ahem…
but because I think it would be nice to have a raft of good digital reference to use as a reality check for the more extreme variety of hysterical parents. It is easy enough to do.
Search for the school or other feature you travelled to independently.
Select the directions button
Change the start location to where you began your trips and select the method of travel. You can drag the line of travel to match your preferred route.
Screen shot the result. In windows the built in screen cap utility ‘Sniping tool’ can be found by beginning typing its name in the start menu. On Mac, buy a PC.
I kid, I kid. Command + Shift + 4 will give you a custom area screen cap.
Upload to an image host of your choice, or email them to me to edit in here.
Edit: First responder, my brother in law Ken Wilson provides this map of his walk from about grade 3 (probably 8 or 9 years of age) onwards with his sibling. Sandgate is a major road but the crossings are clear.
Part of my daily teaching routine is checking the ‘On This Day‘ Wikipedia page. It is always the day of something, though I’ve never noticed this one before. Monkeys are cool, apes are even better. Cut out Palm Oil!
Image from my collection, origin unknown, even Tinyeye is of no help.
Tomorrow we depart on our festivus adventure.
Today we have created a web of irrigation poly that will allow our nominated waterer to set three timers every other day and thereby keep our garden alive in our absence.
Our rough itinerary includes;
A night in Orange, a few days in Sydney, a night on the road north, a few days in Brisbane and a week in Maleny before making the return trip to Cobar.
I need to get packing and I’m hoping to put the sewing machine to work before bed.
by 
