Hanningfield Reservoir beauty

It's been a beautiful day today, blue sky and sunshine. I've not been to Hanningfield Reservoir for ages, so I went for a walk in the conservation area. This picture was taken looking out from a bird observation point at the waters edge. Both the wildlife and landscape looked so inviting in the warm, wintery sunshine.

Pancakes: just read the instructions

Here is young Tom, a scout who has successfully made pancake batter and tossed his pancake without it landing on the floor or roof beams.

Although this was a fun activity, we were training the boys in the art of reading instructions. Few followed them which left them making several mistakes, or should I say created several 'learning opportunities. It is a life skill, but in this day and age, is the printed text just not stimulating and interesting enough to read? What if the instructions were a podcast or a video tutorial? Would more have had greater success and neding less adult input?

Truth is, as long as it was food and somewhere close to edible, the scouts simply stopped caring about how they got there!

Junk mail ticketing

I never ever imagined writing or even giving the time to a piece of
junk mail, but this one caught my eye. It's quite a novel idea but left me wondering if Royal Mail postmen are having to put these through letter boxes the right way round? Turn it the other way and the effect has all but disappeared.

Shared Reading

There was a brilliant moment today when children in my class chose to pair up and share the enjoyment of reading with each other. This was totally unprompted by me as I was slow in discovering what they were doing. I took a sneaky picture of them working quietly, reading to each other and retelling the story.

Road Safety Talk

Pupils were given a Road Safety talk by someone from Essex County Council. They brought along a model car and ramp which showed the effect of not wearing a seat belt after a collision at just 10mph. When the presenter asked the children how many of them don't wear a seat belt regularly, about 5 hands went up. That's about 20% of the class. It was staggered by the statistic when it is so well known how seat belts save lives. Incredible.

Pupils were clearly fascinated by the model. They all wanted to have a go which would have made the demonstration perhaps a bit more hands-on and bring about greater opportunity to remember some of what had been mentioned during the presentation.

Xserve power

I'm simply staggered at just how beautifully engineered Apple computers are and I haven't even switched it on yet!

This powerhouse features 2 Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and 4GB of memory, together with over 1 terabyte of storage space. Although this isn't my server, it is interesting to reflect back on my first WWW server, a Macintosh IIcx featuring a 16 MHz processor and 20MB of memory. Before I adopted Minnie the Minx, she was someone's work machine. Imagine having all that power today!

The ideal party playground

Max chose the Hungry Horse ball park as the venue for his birthday
party. 17 of his friends came along too. The fun wasn't just for the
children as adults had a go too...

Sedan Chairs

Scouts had quite (!) a lot of fun racing up and down the hall in Sedan Chairs having learnt how to tie a square lashing. Later, we gave them a bowl of water to carry on their laps which made the event all the more exciting. This is how learning something telatibely uninteresting can be made both fun and engaging.

Scouts learning how to tie a square lashing

Colin Burrough, Scout Leader of 3rd Billericay, Orion Troop, shows the scouts how to tie a square lashing. This is training for completing the pioneer badge which we later used in a rather fun activity, Sedan Chairs. See above!

Happy Birthday Max

Scout Swimming Gala

The annual Billericay and Wickford Scout Swimming Gala took place this evening at Gloucester Park. Although our scouts did well, we weren't able to achieve enough points between the 6 scouts who participated in order to challenge the top teams. Maybe next year? Congratulations to Flo, Liam, Ben, Tom, Joseph and Ben who represented Orion Troop, 3rd Billericay. Peter Taylor, who was the Team Manager, did a fabulous job at organising the youngsters into their respective races.

Mechanical advantage - it's just physics

Scouts in Orion Troop learnt how to use levers and pulley systems to gain mechanical advantage. Although you never get something for nothing, some very little scouts were able to lift some of the heavier ones!

New blog entry using another mobile device

Hello world.

My Birthday Cake

Every year, it seems to be a tradition for an 'island' cake to be made for my birthday. I think it's something to do with my love of coconut which is the main component of the sea and land. It's stuck down with syrup which makes it properly yummy.

At Macworld 2008 BBC event, London

Here listening to Steve Jobs release new Apple products.

Programming with Lego Mindstorm

Here pupils are using control technology to gain a greater understanding of programming. They were set a range of tasks to complete from launching a liferaft to fetching a satellite. Looked like good fun to me with great learning outcomes.

Learner Voice @ BETT

Horse play!

Scouts on a hiking expedition came across some horses in a field which seemed to want to join us on our walk!

Tactile tools for learning

This lightbox is covered with sand and allows pupils to draw shapes, patterns and letters. It's very similar to my iPod Touch and Sketch app, except it doesn't email the pictures! Great for play in this particular primary school.

Jamboree Dining Shelter

We've recently benefitted from equipment used at the enormous 44,000 big Jamboree camp that took place at Hylands Park in Chelmsford earlier this year. Here, pupils at Stepping Stones have erected a dining shelter for use at their next expedition.

Polyethylene Oxide - "tubeless siphon"

Last Friday, during our science session, we played with a Polyethylene oxide solution which was dyed pink. This experiment is called the "tubeless siphon" and is an example of a non-Newtonian fluid, probably because it doesn't obey the usual rules. It is used it to illustrate the strength of the hydrogen bonds.

Here's how it works.

Simply pour the solution from one beaker to another. As soon as it begins to pour, put the pouring beaker into an upright position, as if to stop pouring. You'll notice that the viscous solution continues to pour or siphons into the other beaker. Clever, huh?

Watch the video! (shot from my mobile phone)

MacBook Pro gets hard disk upgrade

Upgrading the internal hard disk in my MacBook Pro seems to be a bi-annual task these days. The demand for fast, large data storage continues to grow at a rapid pace. I've upgraded to the Hitachi 250gb, 5200rpm disk, opting for faster disk rather than more space, that comes with the 300gb 4200rpm model. Will the available storage capacity be double that of today, in six months time?

Duke of Edinburgh induction morning

great presentation on good practice when working with children who have special needs.

Mixed aged teaching

Classes 4 and 5 are researching famous people using the Internet in preparation for writing a biography. This class of mixed aged children have been grouped by ability and it is a wonderful example of how children in the future will no longer be grouped simply because they share a birthday in the same school year. Thinking about it now, it sounds like complete madness that grouping children by age is indeed sensible or helpful for learners, whom we know, learn at different rates. It was wonderful to observe the success of this initiative, and see children brimming with confidence amongst their peers.

Train line is back in service for the first time in 12 years.

Max, who IS the most wonderful person in the world, helped me put my model railway back into service after 12 years of disuse. Everything was found exactly how it was left, and after some gentle encouragement, we managed to get some of the trains moving again. The whole track was built around the perimeter of the loft space in the family home, making it quite an experience for a little boy of 3 years.

Max had great fun playing with the toy cars which can be placed on a transporter, which took me back to how I had modelled this on my experience of using the French Motorail. One day, I might tell you the whole story of how our car ended up in a completely different place to us, the family, on holiday to the south of France.