A Little Game for Roald Dahl Day
I’ve rejigged a little adjective game I made so that it can be used for Roald Dahl Day. It’s pretty straightforward: Load this webpage: fantasticadjectives Read the text with the class Ask them to add their favourite adjectives in the boxes below Click “Fox It Up” And reread. Happy to make some more if...
Evelyn Waugh’s Letter “This is quite true”
This was read out again last night at Letters Live, this time just as brilliantly by Tom Hollander.
The School Side of the Brain
“When it comes to thinking about learning, nearly all of us have a School side of the brain, which thinks that school is the only natural way to learn, and a personal side that knows perfectly well that it’s not.”
Careful Documentation
This (thank you Cristina) is a great mini-documentary about the impact of documentation as used in the Reggio Emilia schools and with the Making Learning Visible project Documentation: Transforming Our Perspective from Melissa Rivard on Vimeo. Intuitively, I am wholeheartedly behind this sort of approach. Instinctively, too, I worry...
The Discipline of Teaching
More dogears from Smith Real discipline, I would argue, is not always a matter of driving yourself on; real discipline is also knowing when to stop. This goes for all people in all jobs. Certainly, as a teacher you need to pace yourself, to sense when you’re losing your perspective, to recover as you go […]
Explaining the fourth dimension to children
This often comes up in class when we’re talking about volume and area and Dr Who fans are always especially keen to know. My effort to explain the dimensions is to try to link it to English as follows: One dimensional characters are just a line, a name or a signature. You don’t get much […]
Climbing Leave
This letter to the Times, dated 9th September 2013, seemed like a lovely analogy for many children’s experience of school. Sir, In January 1943 the Italian mountaineeer Felice Bernuzzi and two companies escaped from the Allied PoW camp at Nanyski, Kenya, and made a valiant attempt to reach the summit of Mount Kenya, which was...
Intelligence has nothing to do with speed
Love this, from Laurent Schwartz‘s ‘A Mathematician Grappling with his Century’ [via Jo Boaler] “I was always deeply uncertain about my own intellectual capacity; I thought I was unintelligent. And it is true that I was, and still am, rather slow. I need time to seize things because I always need to understand them fully....
Steve Jobs on Teamwork and Rocks
Lovely metaphor for teamwork and difference from Steve Jobs (thanks to Sonja for spotting this) “When I was a young kid there was a widowed man who lived up the street. He was in his eighties. He’s a little scary looking. And I got to know him a little bit. I think he may have […]
Wald and Where The Bullets Aren’t
Love this, from Fast Company: In WWII, Allied bombers were key to strategic attacks, yet these lumbering giants were constantly shot down over enemy territory. The planes needed more armor, but armor is heavy. So extra plating could only go where the planes were being shot the most. A man named Abraham Wald, a Jewish […]