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.

What the World Eats

I just rediscovered an article which I first saw when someone forwarded it to me and then I saw again while flipping through an old copy of Time magazine. It is a photo essay (which is drawn from a book called "Hungry Planet") showing what families in different countries eat, and how much it costs them. It's pretty interesting to take a look at. I think I will use it with my grade 5 class in an attempt to get them thinking about the factors that contribute to our food choices and what influences our attitudes and decisions regarding healthy lifestyles, things like family, peer, media, or how much we can afford to pay for food, or what is available at the grocery store.

Tintin

I read a lot of Tin tin as a kid, next to modern day comic strips he seems pretty tame...but maybe that's OK. Here is an article the economist did on him.

I have been playing around with the idea of what a teacher looks like. What one should look like, what the kids want to see, what I want to wear etc. I did a little getting to know me exercise with my grade 5 class the other day. I brought in a bunch of clothes each of which had a story of some kind attached to it. The kids got a chance to ask me questions about the clothes and then they got to decide on how I ought to wear the clothes. I was trying to play with the idea of clothing as a kind of visual culture, and as something which may give us clues about the wearer. They had fun and made me look pretty ridiculous. Apparently Devendra Banhart had a similar idea. If you want to dress him up click here.

Eat Local

As many of you know I have spent some time working on organic farms, some in Quebec, and more recently at Fraser Common Farm in Aldergrove. This year I helped out a little at the Farmer's market which takes place on Saturdays from May to October beside the Trout Lake Community Center in East Van. If any of you have never been to the Farmers market and are interested in local food issues I would urge you to check them out. The Christmas market is a really great place to pick up nice local presents, if you are into that sort of thing, it is December 20th at the wise Hall on Victoria Drive. For information about farmers markets, what available, where they are when they are etc, please check the website at http://www.eatlocal.org/. Another great resource is Farm Folk City Folk. They are "a non-profit society that works with farm & city to cultivate a local, sustainable food system" and have lots of resources.

Food in Schools

Jamie Oliver has some things to teach school cafeterias.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFkAszCA9dI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkht3noIK0E&feature=related

New York Public library top 100 books for kids

I poached this link from the wide mouthed blog

http://kids.nypl.org/reading/recommended2.cfm?ListID=61

Wide Mouted Blog

This is an amazing blog that has a really good list of books for kids and teenagers. It was started by my preschool teacher's daughter, who is now a librarian. She gives great reviews and has lots of Canadian content. It is called the wide mouthed blog.

Ted Talks: How we learn

This is a link to a bunch of short talks about education including an exceptional one by Ken Robinson

http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/how_we_learn.html

Here is the Ken Robinson one:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html


This one is also pretty amazing and hilarious, it's about Dave Eggers a writer from Brooklyn who decided to start a tutoring center. If you like pirates, superheroes or time travel, you should definitely have a listen.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dave_eggers_makes_his_ted_prize_wish_once_upon_a_school.html

The Biotech Context

This is another talk in the global citizenship seminar series at UBC given by David Suzuki.

http://www.ubc.ca/podcasts/media/mp3/2006/13032006_biotech.mp3

In case you have been in some subterranean vent somewhere...or else just outside of Canada for the last 30 years here's a little bio: David Suzuki is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster, and is well known to millions as the host of CBC's popular science television series, The Nature of Things. An internationally respected geneticist, David Suzuki was a full Professor at the University of British Columbia from 1969 until his retirement in 2001. Currently, he is a professor emeritus with UBC's Sustainable Development Research Institute. Through his role as chair of the David Suzuki Foundation, is widely recognized as a world leader in sustainable ecology.

The End of Education

I have listened to this talk a bunch of times and it is pretty awesome. Dr. David W. Orr is Professor and Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on environmental literacy in higher education and his recent work in ecological design. This includes his efforts to build a $7.2 million Environmental Studies Center at Oberlin College, as well as a continued presence in the environmental literacy scene with 4 books and over 120 articles in scientific, social science, and popular journals. (A Global Citizenship Seminar Series seminar originally presented on 13-Jan-2006)

This is a talk he gave at UBC in January 2006

http://www.ubc.ca/podcasts/media/mp3/2006/13012006_endeducation.mp3

This American Life

This is my favorite weekly podcast. I know the title "This American Life" can be a bit of a turnoff for some of us smug Canadians, get over it, American, s many of them, are really great and this podcast helps me to remember that even a right wing American T.V. evangelist can make you think, and even better, can change his ways. It is a FREE broadcast out of Chicago by NPR. You can subscribe to it and if you have iTunes it will automatically load the new show onto your computer each week, or you can listen to the shows straight off the internet, all you have to do is go to the links and click where is says "full episode" in orange.

A few which relate to teaching in some way are:
"Music Lessons"fairly self explanatory,
"Going Big" which tells the story of a project in Harlem called Baby College which aims to put childrens' futures in their own hands rather than continually trying to "fix" their parents, but seems to accomplish both objectives. It also has the story of families coping with mosaic down syndrome, and the unconventional solution one of them comes to.
"The Cruelty of Children" again, self explanatory, but I will tell you that this tels of how a kindergarted teacher invokes a new rule "you can't say you can't play", and how it actually works.
"A Little Bit of Knowledge" is a confusing thing.

Teaching Green Books

This past summer I went to a green product convention down at Canada place and aside from all the free lip balms and reusable bags I came away with a couple of great books. One is called "Teaching Green - the elementary years" here is a link to Green Teacher Magazine which has info about this series of books and how to order them.
http://www.greenteacher.com/