Welcome to family, friends and visitors. Here you will find interesting (hopefully) pictures of my part of the world, news of our household and probably, long ramblings about anything that catches my interest.

Friday, 24 June 2011

Festival Time.

Typical Glastonbury weather - pouring with rain, so for once I'm glad that I'm at home watching it on tv with the sound turned right up, and not trying to set up a tent on the mud. One day I'll get there. This year there are over 15,000 people there who are over 50 so it isn't just for the young. I was watching some interviews and one of the people interviewed was there for the first time .... and in her 70s. It's not on next year so maybe the year after. I won't even be going to the LLAMA festival this year. Last year there was an illegal rave and illegal camping at the same time as the festival. The local council tried to make the festival organisers responsible for this (it's a mainly free festival run by volunteers) even though the festival is estimated to bring in £9 million to the area with the result that the festival is off for this year.
It was all fun and games in class today. As we are learning about Greece I thought I would be very up to date and call one of my lessons 'citizenship' which is one of the latest educational buzz words. I decided to do a 'hot seating' activity where, after having to leave the class because of a spurious message from another teacher, I did a quick change and banged on the back door dressed as King Bossus. The children are used to hot-seating where we or they take on the persona of a character and answer questions from the rest of the children. Usually the costume is only token or might even just be a label but today I dressed in a full length cloak, put on a wild black wig and a quickly made beard and moustache and weilded a decorated staff. I told them I was going to pull down the school to build myself a palace and they would all be my slaves and generally acted in a dictatorial manner. When I returned as myself the children were quite indignant about the 'Greece king' which led to a good discussion about democracy, being fair and misuse of power. Most of them thought it was me but weren't quite sure and for the rest of the day they kept trying to get me to admit that it was me. At one point in the day as we decorated Hoplite shields one of my boys said with great feeling "I didn't know maths could be so much fun," but hey symmetry and repeating patterns are part of maths too.

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