Free Environmental resources tailored to BC curiculum!

Visit the David Suzuki Foundation website, or click here to register and download your FREE comprehensive teacher package for teaching "the nature challenge" in your classroom! In the words of the Doc:

As educators, you are in a unique position to effect real change on how we treat the earth. Teach students that small, simple steps can help protect nature, and you ground them in the awareness of that every individual – no matter how small or young – can make a big difference.

David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge Teacher’s Guide contains 20 lessons that use discovery-based learning to explore the key concepts of David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge. The introductory lessons are focused on how everything is connected to nature. Core lessons explore how choices about our homes, food, and transportation affect the environment.

Here are the 10 things David would like you to do:
1 Reduce home energy use by ten per cent.
2 Choose an energy-efficient home & appliances.
3 Don’t use pesticides.
4 Eat meat-free meals one day a week.
5 Buy locally grown and produced food.
6 Choose a fuel-efficient vehicle.
7 Walk, bike, carpool or take transit.
8 Choose a home close to work or school.
9 Support alternative transportation.
10 Learn more and share with others.

Jacques Cousteau

Is one of the best ever.

Babar does yoga and so can you!

I have been doing some yoga with my grade 5 students, and as a result have been trying to find some good books with ideas on how to teach yoga to kids specifically. A friend from school has lent me a couple of great books, but I was still looking for more so I went to the UBC book store to take a peek. The salesladies were a bit stimped at first and then exclaimed that they had the perfect book for me. This perfect book is Babar's Yoga for Elephants. Unlike most books this one offers great sequences of poses while also being totally unintimidating. I have showed it to a few people, including my uncle who has never done yoga bt has somehow been convinced to accompany my Aunt on a yoga retreat in mexico, and he asked if he could borrow it. I am using it and feeling better myself! Sometimes when I am learning from the adult books I can't help but feel like I am doing something wrong all the time, and I likely am. My legs hate to straighten, my shoulders bunch up etc etc etc. Babar doesn't seem to worry about all this. In his world the important thing is to give it a try, so I do, and the kids so too.

Emily Dickinson

I have been looking up various artists and for some reason Emily Dickinson swam into my head. I have been thinking that I ought to read more poetry, and I love her poems and her story.

Gustav Klimt

I can't remember why but Gustav Klimt came up in conversation today and so I thought I would throw something up here about him. He remains one of my favorite artists, but I swear the photographs of his paintings don't do them justice. In real life they are breathtaking. I hope you get a chance to see one one day, and I hope I get a chance to see more of them. He loved to paint women, which is nothing terribly remarkable, but he does it in a way where they usually appear powerful, usually sexually powerful, but there is a sense of intensity even whithout that, as is the case in this portrait of Mada Primavesi.

Green Schools

I have just been looking around on the provincial education websites and have found some info on the "Green Schools" innitiative. There are links to climate change lesson plans, short videos about teachers who are making a difference and doing things like implementing composting programs, releasing salmon fry into local rivers, making 100 mile meals in home ec class etc etc etc. Lots of great ideas, home I can work some of them into my practicum!

An article from the Onion, who as usual, got it right:

Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

November 5, 2008 | Issue 44•45

WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

Inauguration day

Barack has invoked Lincoln since the beginning. Today he will be inaugurated with Lincoln's own bible in his pocket. Bible or no bible I am pretty excited, and this change does seem, so epic, you might say it's of relatively biblical proportions.
They did it. In the words of Sam Cooke "a change is gonna come".

Fruit is strange and beatiful

A friend sent me a neato globe and mail article about seeds and fruits. I have seen other seed books by this guy before, his pictures are pretty beautiful. Aftre thinking about how we mutilate and reform our own bodies it is interesting to think how we also like to play with the shape of others too, in my case I prefer to marvel at it, although I thinkthe idea of crosspolinating things is pretty neat...

Love your body

I'm sure there are members of every generation who believe as I so often do that "things today" must be weirder than ever before...I get freaked out sometimes about body image issues in our culture, especially when I see young girls in heels and/or tummy tops discussing how "fat" Britney Spears is or WHATEVER. This type of thing of course pales in comparison to all the freakish reality TV shows they have on now about cosmetic surgery and the like. To be honest I don't watch these shows, but even hearing about them discourages and alarms me. I got an email though the other day and well, it kind of puts the present situation in perspective and makes me think that maybe we are just AS weird, but not more so. A number of years ago my Aunt and I went to Toronto to check out the new Yoko Ono exhibit, and among other delightful stops on that trip was our visit to the shoe museum. There we saw an exhibit about foot binding. This was a custom practiced on young girls and women for approximately one thousand years in China beginning in the 10th century and ending in the early 20th century. For more details check out the wikipedia site and this crazy slideshow comparing some of today's masochistic fashions, and those of the past. Seeing this makes me feel lucky to have grown up surrounded by confident women who knew and know how beautiful they are. One of these wise women once said "In ten years you will look at a picture of yourself and think, damn! I looked great! So save yourself the time and worries and love your body today" all I know is I want to move as far as possible away from fashions that restrict, deform and disempower. I am it seems instead adopting a uniform consisting mainly of loafers, cardigans, loose dresses and tights. I just wish it were warm enough to not have to think so much about clothes. As it stands now I feel like I have to plan 3 outfits every time I go out by the time I add all the necessary layers. I hope Tahiti is still looking for teachers by the time I graduate.

Here are a couple of pics of a little impromptu art/o/graphy project that Jaime, Kim and I did. Well, really, they did the work and I just stood there getting decorated. Pretty sweet deal for me. They hot glued all these pretty little fabric scraps onto me. I hope this "dress" it is still kicking around somewhere because I want it!

Personal Hygiene

Apparently the issue of personal hygiene is one that parents have battled children about for much longer than I can imagine. It seems the answer for Heinrich Hoffmann was to create scary stories about monsters who would come and chop of the thumb you were intent on sucking...or something like that. Cool pictures though. Apparently Maurice Sendak is a big fan of the old illustrations too. Looks like someone has decided to take a modern spin on things too. I must say that some days at school when I smell the stinky feet and see the unclipped nails I wonder if maybe I ought to give these scare tactics a try?

The Japanese Solution to getting kids to eat healthy

Here's another Ted Talk, pretty inspiring. Evelyn Glennie is a musician, a percussionist to be more specific. She is also hearing impaired, but I would never of known that. She shows why we shouldn't judge books by covers, and why we should listen with our whole bodies.

Tiffany Bozic

Here's another fave, Tiffany Bozic I like her animals, and her muted colours and the way she creates stories with unlikely companions. She is an amazing painter to boot. I like her circles and how comfortably and beautifully she deals with death as an inherent and amazing part of the natural world. She is contemporary, and her stuff has blown my mind ever since I found out about it. Also I heard from a friend that Tiffany's good friend works for the Museum of natural history in San Francisco and that their shared love of animals and nature has led to a show recently where she colaborated with the California Academy of Sciences’ marine invertebrate collections to create a show entitled From the Depths, a sort of love child born from art and science. Featuring large-scale paintings and sketches this exhibit "transported visitors into the depths of both the ocean and the imagination, and present an artist’s vision of the life-and-death drama that unfolds beneath the sea. The exhibit also included photographs, preserved specimens from the Invertebrate Zoology collection, and artfully designed tanks with live fish."

Rather than have me give a butchered explanation here is more info straight from Tiffany's website:
"This exhibit is the result of a year-long collaboration between Bozic and Dr. Rich Mooi, curator of Invertebrate Zoology & Geology at the Academy. Despite examining the museum collections from very different perspectives, they found common ground in their passion for discovery and understanding life. Nature’s ability to inspire both artist and scientist will form an important theme throughout the exhibit.

Artists

think it is time to switch from food to something else...art. I have seen a fair bit of pretty boring art projects in the public school system. There are glimmers of hope out there and I hope that I and my colleagues will help to change that...Here is a starting place. I am going to just start putting up links to some of my favorite artists.
The first is a guy who's name I can almost never remember, but who is an incredible inspiration. I love his colours, I love his eccentricity. Check him out Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Today was better. whew. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Also, I am listening to a radio show about the T25, a new super efficient car being designed by an ex-race car designer. He aims to create cars which are smaller, lighter, made of upcycled plastic, and overall infinitely more efficient than the cars being produced at present. Here are some pictures and here is a link to his website.

It could be the "model T of today" it's all about urban mobility.

Today was a harder day than I have been used to. The kids were noisy, I was tired. I had to use my big voice. They didn't understand. It was painful. Noisy and painful. Nowhere to go but up.