the road to work

Yes, really!

breakfast in the sun

My house talks to me.  When it starts making a good solid clunking sound as the sun heats the roof past a certain temperature, I know that summer is on the way.  It’s been months since this happened but now, each morning when I hear it, I know the day will be warm.  Yesterday was the first Saturday morning for some time that I sat outside in the sun among the shells, stones and bleached driftwood and bones collected from the beach, listening to the sound of birds and the surf.  Bliss! Before I knew it I was dead-heading the arctotis.  No commitments, no demands on my time, I’m just relaxed and being spontaneous.   I have a real sense that I am exactly where I should be, doing what it best for my spiritual, physical, emotional and mental health, so like I said . . . Bliss!

 

kid’s work

Oh I am so slack sometimes.  NO! Not true!  I have been incredibly busy and had a bad back into the bargain that kept me away from the computer to a large extent.   Excuses?  No, reasons.

Another reason I haven’t shared some of the results of the work with students that I wrote about in my last post, playing at work, was that I was unsure of which parents had signed consent forms.  I have permission from parents and students to share work and in some cases permission to share photos of students working.  While parents may sign consent, I won’t share unless the student agrees.  So, here are some examples of student work. 

These were their very first pages and the topic was their positive attributes.  First I asked what they thought they were . . . oh difficult!  We have a culture of not blowing our own trumpet in New Zealand as the tall poppy quickly gets cut down.  Then I asked what someone who knew them well, their parents, an aunty, uncle or grandparent, the teacher, might say of them . . . much easier!

After their second pages, quite a few students went back to this first one and added detail.   Their concentration was wonderful to see . . . in both boys and girls.  I had fun, they had fun, and some of the conversations were quite revealing about how they feel about themselves.

I set the topic, showed them a few ideas, demonstrated some lettering techniques and they took it from there . . . if they took one of my ideas from the pages I showed them, then they truly made it their own!

More soon . . . I promise!