• [slideshow]
    I had a brilliant day today. Jenny Harpur, Deputy Head of the wonderfully named Windwhistle Primary School in Weston Super, Mare invited me to officially open the new school library which she has been planning and arranging and building and stocking and getting ready over the last two or three years.

    I got the easy part, cutting the ribbon and letting everyone in!

    I spent the rest of the day storytelling to all the different groups in the school.

    I was really pleased that I’d had yet another edit to my Naughty Girl story that I’ve mentioned before. I had a go at it last night and it seems to be really coming together. I’ve read it a few times in schools over the last few weeks and each time I get a new insight.

    I think, after about ten years, I’m almost there with it now. I read it to year 2 and the nursery. No one was scared too much which was good!

    Thanks all of you for a wonderful and fabulously sunny day. Enjoy your Library – I’m sure you will!

  • Should I be locked up?!

    I’m sure it could be classed as peeping tommery or something awful, but I find facebook face-hopping a fascinating way of wasting a moment while something is downloading. Look at a list of your friends friends and choose one. Then choose one of their friends and so on and see how far you get. My criteria for choosing someone is that their profile picture should stand out in someway as different to the others and all the other profiles pic on Facebook.

    Six degrees of separation.

    One of my starting points is on the teachertube website. While I load my videos up, they present a box of faces from the teachertube Facebook page. These people come from all around the world. Teachertube is a bit slow, so I often get tempted to click on a pic and see where it goes.

    Often you end up with a page with no friends to choose because the person has blocked that link to those who aren’t their fiends already. Just now, I got about five or six links in when I noticed that the glamorous lady in Jakarta was a Facebook friend of one of my Facebook friends! What are the chances? Pretty high I should think, but it adds strength to the assertion that we are all connected by only six degrees of separation.

    Is Facebook profile hopping appropriate?

    I think so. If you don’t want to be seen and observed don’t put yourself on display. What do you reckon?

  • I had a wonderful day on Monday, at Mitcheldean Endowed Primary School. I’ve known the Head Teacher, Julia Dowding, for some time, Indeed, her husband was my children’s primary school head. Mr Powell, who taught my children maths, was also there, so it was a bit of a reunion!

    What a very hot day. We were in the hall with the doors wide open and, luckily, a fan twirling around in the centre of the octagonal, pointy ceiling.

    At lunchtime, I sat in on the auditions for lead roles in the school production. All were very good – I wouldn’t want to be the one making the decisions as to who plays which role.

    Again, my video drawing lessons had gone before me and some of the children had been busily drawing the Ginger Ninja. If no one else wants to reprint the Ginger Ninja, I think maybe I should make use of modern online printing technology and put it back into print myself! The book seems to have a definite, continuing life.

    Thanks everyone in Mitcheldean for a really great day – Keep on reading!