The Big Draw organisation in the UK uploaded this wonderful idea for a City diorama created by Katie Kennedy from RIBALearning for fun architectural activities ... it is so simple!! I love the way they teach kids to divide the panorama into foreground, middleground and background in such a straightforward way. I can only download the instructions, for some reason. Check out the Big draw website May 2020 for all the images on the full document. It's worth looking at! I had a thought about how we might record our lives in the midst of the Covid 19 pandemic..... for posterity. A still life or 'My still life' felt as if it would work.. so here is my idea. Try it. I think it will work for anyone... anywhere in the world February 2020:
I am sitting in a French cafe in Makati, Manila, indulging in good coffee and chocolate pastries thinking about what my plans are for 2020. I have deliberately not thought about the coming year until I had completed our Laos project. That was last week. This week is the Phillipines on a tour with La Trobe university social scientists to Attenao university and beyond. Laos was a wonderful success and a reminder to me about how powerful project based learning can be to connect teachers and children to real world problems and how worthwhile good planning is!! When it works it gives everyone such joy. These teachers from up and down the Mekong in Laos were most concerned about what was currently happening to the birds, kangaroos and koalas and the Australian countryside in the bushfires. Thai television had been broadcasting the catastrophe and the teachers were full of it. Who would have known? This made it a rather interesting experience for me as they had much sympathy for us. Us Aussies. We who have always thought of Asia as a poor relation were most concerned about us?? That rather blew me away. Here I was talking about protecting endangered birds and here they were saying ‘We are sorry for your loss. We think your problem is worth remarking upon. ‘ Made me think long and hard about who was working with who. In the end, my time in Asia has given me such a strong sense of community and connectedness. We are all in this world together. We are all dependent upon each other. No one has the upper hand. Us westerners need as much intervention as the people in poverty.. just different. We all need the collective wisdom to solve our current climate complexities. No one is escaping the challenge of this change. We have to work together to solve the issue or we are doomed. Sounds dramatic but this is how it feels to me. The young President of Attenao university here in the Phillipines quoted a fellow called Joseph Haidt at an address on Wednesday night. His statement was : “Take an aisle seat," ....meaning, sit near people who disagree with you on a specific issue, so you can make each other smarter. This makes such good sense to me in my old age. That’s my plan for the future. Listen better ( yes ....I know) and hear the disagreements. Really hear them. I am on to it. |