Year of Personal Discovery

Back again – at last! This year my school has a theme for the year of “Believe You Can Achieve”, tying in with the Year of Personal Discovery. I am certainly lining up the opportunities for myself, aside from the obvious part of being in Hong Kong: this semester I am enrolled in a 9-week ESL/EAL course, tackling the Level 1 ActivInspire online course, and  yoga, and am going to be a relief teacher for the English Language Saturday School next term. We only have 9 days left of Term 1, and I’m not quite sure where the first 7 weeks went…

 

Other points of discovery this term have included how to ask Wikipedia to unblock our school’s open proxy so that Year 6 can add carefully researched information to specific articles, and how to export a ppt file into a wmv and embed it into a page on our Moodle-based Online Learning Platform to provide a tutorial on completing the Online Reading Record for the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge.

I am also making time to read more – spending as many lunchtimes as I can with my nose in a book, sitting somewhere in the middle of the Library so as to be available and obviously aware of what everyone is doing. The last book I finished was Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick, another breathtaking blend of text and illustration brought together in a marvellous piece of storytelling. I deeply enjoyed his first book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and pounced on this new title excitedly when it arrived. One thing I found particularly interesting was that switching between text and illustration seemed to actually slow me down – I ended up savouring the story at a more leisurely pace, examining the pictures for details to provide the visual equivalent of adjectives and adverbs.
Image courtesy of ShuttrKing|KT on Flickr “The Other Side” Used under CC licence.