Wednesday 26 January 2011

Upcycling

With Adrian over, Rowan has been hanging off him and not giving him a moment's peace. Mind you, Sean and Finn aren't much better. Sharon arranged for Adrian to go into Finn's P2 class on Monday morning to give them a talk on his "upcycling" and salvage projects. This is where Adrian looks to give old furniture parts or waste material a new life as part of a new piece of furniture. (See Adrian's furniture site for more details.)

The children really enjoyed the talk and surprised Adrian with some of their questions like "where do you get your ideas?" I think Finn was really proud to have his uncle doing a talk in class. Both Finn and Sean have had fun with Adrian's 3-D modelling program on his laptop. After the talk the children wrote letters to Adrian with pictures of what they would make out of recycled material, which Finn brought home.

Having really enjoyed doing his River Forth presentation as festive homework, Sean is desperate to put together a presentation on his new topic, the Romans. He wants on the laptop at every opportunity to play with OpenOffice, but he needs to learn that Roman fanfares (ad nauseum) on each slide transition, lots of pictures and different fonts are novel, but not necessarily the best looking. Still, think back to what we had in P4. Pritt sticks, Blu-tak and double-sided tape were technological breakthroughs back then, never mind creating your own slide deck on a small computer that doesn't need to plug in anywhere yet can access information all over the world. Remarkable.

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