Child of the Library

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SLF11 Prep

Spent this afternoon trying to sign up for the Scottish Learning Festival again – the first time the registration pages froze on me, second time the computer crashed, third time lucky. Actually I’m pretty glad that I did because it make me reconsider which seminars to choose. The whole event is like an annual mental [...]

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Congratulations, Patrick Ness

Patrick Ness has won the Carnegie Award for Monsters of Men, or let’s be honest, for the complete Chaos Walking trilogy, and well deserved too (all three chapters have been shortlisted after all). However, I personally would like to thank Mr Ness for his outstanding defence of books, reading, libraries, and librarians. Here’s a snippet [...]

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Jencks’ mine art

I’m really excited about an article I’ve just seen on the Scotland Outdoors website. I love their podcast and was exploring the articles on the website when I noticed one called Charles Jencks landscape artist. I really like a lot of the land art that I’ve seen, although unfortunately it’s mostly been online or in [...]

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Storyboarding with Deep Fried Films

This was a fascinating bit of CPD with Martin Greechan from Deep Fried Films, looking at just one aspect of film-making: the storyboard. So what did we learn today? Film has certain similarities to books, with scenes instead of chapters, and a different grammar. First we learned some vocabulary There are different styles of shots: [...]

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Bothwell Castle and Dechmont Hill

Took plenty of photos at Bothwell Castle at the weekend, and despite the overcast, a quick look suggests that they’ve turned out quite well. In particular, there’s a nice green tinge from the moss that didn’t show up in bright sunshine. On the other hand, it may look terrible on the computer screen. I’ve noticed [...]

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Sensory development

I love seeing a project develop and grow tendrils and blossom in all sorts of directions. Teacher1 asked Teacher2 if she could create some A5 poetry cards for our sensory garden. T2 said there was no time. T1 asked me. I spoke to T3 about using LRC time. T3 amenable. Simple enough. But then the project [...]

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Day 6 – Type and colour

Learned tonight (from Nicholas Crane’s Britannia) that the terms upper case and lower case come from the top and bottom cases that the type was stored in. This nugget of printing trivia leads me to today’s photo. Daughter asked me to open this pack of crayons,which were cunningly sealed to prevent entry. As the lid came [...]

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Could you hand me a brick wall, please?

Last week I spoke to the students about how to get the best out of their school library – how to help the Librarian, what to expect in return, not forgetting “we are all individuals“. I thought my mindmap of notes just required printing, but instead it was nowhere to be seen. And I knew [...]

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Working together

Do you know what the problem is with  the Curriculum for Excellence?  .. it’s not difficult. You think it will be difficult, awkward, clunky etc Surely it should be. But actually, it’s so straightforward. ? And yet you find yourself looking past the simplicity of it to see what you’re missing. (NB this is purely a personal [...]

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