Saturday 27 July 2013

New Post on the New Blog

Just a quick post and run, to remind that I am now starting to use my new blog site....

The New Blog Page

Wednesday 17 July 2013

Fossil Walls...

For the last six weeks, I've been working in various primary schools in the local area.

We've been making 'fossil walls' - a process that I happened upon almost accidentally that gave some rather surprising and lovely results - modern day (or any) objects, cast, and because of the sand used in the process, I thought they looked like fossils.

Each school chose their own designs and ideas.  Some of the schools I went into chose to do individual blocks, where the children brought in items that were important or significant to them; others wanted to leave a 'legacy' for other children coming up through the years with their words of wisdom (quite interesting choices from 10 year olds!).  We also have done some plaques on based on areas of the curriculum, as well as designs based on school logos and mottos.

In all schools, the children actually got very involved with the making - from deciding what went into each design, to piling sand into containers and finding objects to insert.  There's some of the more technical and Health and Safety stuff I've had to do myself of course, but I've tried to let the children participate as much as possible - this is their work.  Oh, and in most schools, I've had some lovely able helpers at the end of each day to tidy up.

It's been great fun, if hard work; the children have been a delight with their wit, intelligence, creative thinking, helpfulness and politeness.

Here's a couple of examples below.   I am looking forward to them all being dried out enough to seal and getting them installed to decorate all the school spaces (even if that's more work for me!)

Curriculum and classroom names

Einstein said...

Inspired by the school logo

What subject?

Words of Wisdom from Year 6

Don't forget, I will be blogging from my new website directly soon, so if you've got following software, don't forget to bookmark it here: New Blog Page

Monday 8 July 2013

Time For A Fresh New Look

I first created my website back four years ago as part of my final year degree course - I was very proud of it, as it was all hand-coded by me.  It was quick, logical and worked well.

But... adding new photos was not always so easy, so I've been re-developing my site in the 'background' for months now.  And it has been almost ready for ages too, just waiting for those final tweaks.

This weekend, I decided it was now or never, and launched the new look.  There are still a few areas that need filling out, but maybe now it's live I will actually do that!  You can still click  through to the new look site using the links at the left - it is still at the same web address.  You might need to refresh your page if you've visited the old site before, it might have it in your 'cache' - on Windows, it's 'CTRL+F5'.

There is a blog page within the actual site, which for now, has just got all the previous posts from this blog imported - but soon I will be writing new blog posts within the website, rather than separately so if you use any form of following software (or indeed you link to my blog on your own website/blog) you might want to add the new page to your RSS/feed reader now for when that gets under way:

MY NEW BLOG PAGE


Hope you like the new site, and I do hope you will carry on following my random and somewhat intermittent lately (!) blog posts in future