Laptops and Homophones

By Vita Forest

At school, during Literacy groups, where three different activities run concurrently under my leadership and another is outside reading with a parent, we had, what you might call, an incident.

Martin, at ten years old, was becoming frustrated with a program he was interacting with on a laptop.  The cursor was not cooperating.  His responses were not being recorded.  He couldn’t move around the screen as he wished.  Some of his peers looked up like meerkats and turned their heads in his direction, while other class members jumped up to look over his shoulder and offer suggestions.  But all too soon, his muttering and irritation escalated into shouting and rage.  Along with the increase in volume, came a quickly accelerating wave and then explosion of fury which saw him slam down the lid of the laptop and raise it above his head all the better to hurl it across the room…

“Martin!” I shrieked with obvious great authority and calmness.

It was all I could do, being across the other side of the room deeply involved in deciphering his classmates’ handwriting and how they were responding to the latest chapter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Luckily it distracted him long enough to hesitate and in that moment of hesitation I was able to sprint across the distance and gently press the weapon back down onto the benign surface of the desk.  He took some deep breaths and blinked.

‘Do you need to get some fresh air?’ I asked in a quieter tone, kneeling beside him.

He nodded and stood and marched out of the classroom.  I sent an extremely calm student out to follow him on his walk.

The meerkats returned to their work and the classroom returned to the more normal level of noise for Literacy Groups.  Martin returned after ten minutes walking in the sunshine, calmer, with his earlier meltdown forgotten.

Later, as I was marking the stack of books containing the students’ responses to ‘Troublesome Homophones’, I came across the following sentence used by Jason to demonstrate his knowledge of thecorrect way of spelling ‘there’  “The laptop was thrown over there.”

I called him over to my desk and pointed to the sentence nodding in appreciation.

‘Good use of ‘there’,’ I said.

He grinned.

‘I like to look around and get inspiration from what’s going on around me,’ he said.

Indeed.

Holiday watchlist

By Vita Forest

Last week on holildays in Kiama, we took some DVDs to watch each night.  Here is what we chose…  A bit of nostalgia, a bit of fun, a few classics…  All recommended!

• The Hundred Foot Journey (2014 ) Lasse Hallstrom’s feel-good film about what happens when a family of Indian immigrants buys a run-down restaurant across the road from a Michelin-star winning restaurant in a picturesque French village.  Rivalry, racism, love and food!
• The Goonies (1985) A bunch of kids set out on an adventure in a last ditch attempt to save their town from unscrupulous developers.  Treasure maps, pirates, legends, and lots of screaming.  Features some familiar faces from the 1980s.
• Rosalie Blum (2015) – An alligator, a peeing thief, and a dog masquerading as a lion… all appear in this French film about three lonely people whose lives intersect in unexpected, hilarious and heart-warming ways.
• Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) – a thirteen year old boy who’s a ‘real bad egg’ and a surly loner  go on the run from the authorities in the New Zealand bush.  Taika Waititi’s classic.
• Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) – an animated film directed by Hayao Miyazaki and based on the novel by Diana Wynne Jones.  As always from Studio Ghibli, it features superb animation, complex characters who are never truly good or evil and mouth-watering scenes of food.
• Strictly Ballroom (1992) – Baz Luhrman and his team’s first film and my favourite of all of them!  The battle between the new and the old set in the world of ballroom dancing – and featuring some familiar Sydney locations.  A magic  blend of music, humour and visual delights.  The perfect pick me up when you’re feeling down.
• Singin’ in the Rain (1952) – the classic Hollywood musical set in the 1920s with fabulous songs, dancing and a winning story.  Just heaven!

We also picked up a couple of other titles while browsing op shops etc.  These were

• The Sound of Music
• The Matrix

What have you been watching?

From the balcony

By Vita Forest

In the early morning

There are joggers and cyclists

Dark silhouettes against the pearly sky

And the band of bootcampers

Swinging bells and balls

As they squat and straighten

On the soft green grass

 

I sit sipping tea

As they walk beneath the balcony

We’ve come to show you their hair,

the mother says to the white-haired neighbour watching the sea

And the girls turn obligingly to show

the twisted plaits

That start at their temples

And ring their skulls

Like crowns

 

The father in the singlet shepherds his kids across the carpark

She, riding a tiny white horse

Rolling on plastic wheels that grind on the asphalt

He, a blue grown-up scooter that

glides smooth with every press of his foot

while a car waits and lets them pass

engine idling

 

The black-clad teenager pulls in below

beneath the long flickering fingers of the pine

Sits a moment

Not yet time to start his shift

At the restaurant across the way

Just time enough to listen to one more song

As the engine ticks and cools

 

I like to look at beautiful things

By Vita Forest

Yesterday I saw

• From the train – mauve jacaranda blossoms rubbing shoulders with swathes of magenta bouganvillea blooms.  The sight of it momentarily silenced the woman behind me on the train in mid-sentence.
• The headland of Barangaroo on the approach from Wynyard.  Noticing how the lush terraces of Sydney trees are now obscuring the paths along the hillside.
• The splendid sight of all those beautiful clay vessels at the Clay Canoe stall at the Finders Keepers Market at Barangaroo.  All those layers and lines of vases and sculptures, as if a bunch of drawings from Shaun Tan’s books had come to life and were congregating together.  I mentioned this to one of the owners – apparently I was not the first to make such a comparison.  They did not know Shaun Tan’s work and were going to have to look it up…
• A gorgeous gal from my class who noticed me as I stood lounging in the shade of the entrance of The Cutaway sketching the Stoop Bros’homemade, steam punk airstream trailer.  Kids are always amazed to discover I don’t actually live at school…
• Sketchers perched in shadowy spaces under trees on the terraced steps on the hills of Barangaroo.  After a week of crazy, unpredictable weather, it was hot and sunny.
• A family paddling barefoot in the water lapping over the sandstone slabs at Nawi Cove, Barangaroo.
• A nifty paint palette made by one of the sketching gang from a tiny fishing tackle case.
• The smiles on the faces of the Stroop brothers as we surprised them by holding up our sketches of their stall.

I chatted to one of the potter-extraordinaires from Clay Canoe as I stood admiring their wares.  I explained that I was not in the market for another of their vases just at that current moment (having already bought one very recently).  ‘So you just like looking at beautiful things?’ she remarked.

Indeed.  Indeed I do like to look at beautiful things.

Things of my table

By Vita Forest

Things on my table

1. Three scarlet pomegranates in a blue pottery bowl.
2. A streaky white resin bowl containing shells from various sea-side holidays, mostly pale.
3. A stack of four water colour palettes that screw together to form a pleasing shallow cylinder.
4. A tall vase of luscious pink and cream peonies.
5. A hexagonal glass jar half-filled with water.
6. Two writing notebooks and sharp HB pencil.
7. A 6B graphite pencil, solid lead sharpened with a knife, pewter-coloured shards flaking off to form a point.
8. My sketchbook and a wad of thick, textured water colour paper.
9. Two cats, alternating between napping and eyeing the bobbing heads of the peonies, aliens from The World Outside.
10. A finished sketch of those pomegranates in their blue bowl.

Stretching rainbows

By Vita Forest

Sitting under hats around the table

Blindingly silver in the sunlight

Waiting for the ripening buds of leaves

to burst into green shade

Two ten year-old girls creep closer

Slatted against tree trunks

Pressing their grins into calloused bark

Stifling laughter

Remembering them at six, at seven

When their mouths held gaps and Tahlia astonished

with her description

of a dog’s soft wet nose

And their two heads bent over a stretch of rainbow

Building waves of red and yellow and green

When their hair was longer

And their legs were shorter

Eryldene 2018

By Vita Forest

Under the red pavilion

In the quiet of the garden

Brushing my pencil over the white to

Build the retreat out of triangle and square

Stretching up a pink angophora

from the bottom of the page

Listening to the lorrikeets against the softly misting rain

And the scratch of the brush turkey beneath the camellias

Under the deep roof of the verandah

Sipping tea

Cosied under a knitted posy

Spreading scones with cream and jam

And coaxing out the rough bark of a jacaranda

As I chat to Kate

Sipping coffee and eating scones as

she waits for her paint to dry.

Fox prints

By Vita Forest

Have you read Margaret Wild’s Fox?  It is a searing tale of friendship, jealousy, temptation, grief and loss.  Did I mention it’s a children’s picture book?

My class has been examining it closely.  Noticing the similes, the use of present tense, the metaphors, the personification, the colours used by the illustrator Ron Brooks, the layout of the pages and the unusual scratchy lettering.

This week,  after a boring old handwriting lesson (“check your pencil grip, stay on the lines, sit up straight, trace slowly and carefully, form your letters in just the right way”) we changed gear to explore how Ron Brooks’ lettering contributed to the story.

He experimented and took some time to get it just right.  Brooks ended up writing the text by hand and using his left hand (he is right handed), hacking out the words, tracing some of the letters over and over, writing them down and then up the sides of pages, on diagonals, in capitals (screaming).  In short, breaking all the handwriting rules.

We looked at the book again and focused on the writing, looking not at what it said but how it said it.  The kids had a play on little whiteboards, swapping their usual writing hands, using capitals where they should have used lowercase, reversing their letters, looking away when they wrote, turning their boards upside down, writing over and over in the same space.  Then they chose a piece of coloured paper, a handful of oil pastels and went away to make their marks as one of the three characters – half-blind, trusting Dog, griefing, wary Magpie or sly, jealous, lonely Fox.  The stipulation – they could only write the name of their character, nothing more, nothing less.

Miss Sadie, rather cheeky and daring, stared me in the face and screwed up her paper into a ball.  I stared back at her and said, “Yes!  If you are Fox, that might be just what you would do.”  (They have witnessed one of their classmates do this same action on a rather regular basis when he is distressed and in the midst of a meltdown).  Suddenly, there was scrunching, there was ripping, there was smudging, there was scraping.  Some of them wrote their character’s name just once, others repeated the lines over and over and over again.

Another happy accident occurred when I handed out some black mounting paper that I had cut in half to what I thought was a good size to frame their work.  It turned out it was too small.  “Stick it on an angle,” I advised.  And the artworks looked better than they would have with a neat black border.

The next day, we sat in a circle and held up the artworks for others to see.  The students went around the circle and explained what they did, how they did it and why.  Amongst the “I did it coz that’s what I felt like” there were some gems.  Kelly left space around Magpie’s name because she was left all alone.   Sharni wrote Dog’s name without looking at the paper because Dog was blind and Lana ripped away a piece of Fox’s signature because his heart was broken in two.

Don’t tell me kids can’t understand difficult stories…

There’s a poem in that

By Vita Forest

There’s a poem in

The way we hate vegemite

And the way others don’t

The excuses she makes for missing

every single meeting

The vibrating cat that sits perched on my lap

Like a humming loaf

The scarlet red of the flowers on the coral tree and

the way they fall apart if you remove them from the tree

The smiling girl in the photo who just last week

tried to kill herself

The rock that you step over on the path

In the shape of a heart

The shriek as we leap the channel surging back to the sea

And land heavy-heeled in the retreating water

The light patter of rain

On the hood of my new black raincoat

The bowl full of  shells

That sits in the middle of the table.

Poems

everywhere.

This week

By Vita Forest

Near Woolwich Dock, Sydney

This week or so I have been

WRITING

• Blue Gum (for Lucy)
• A poem and a short story for a competition

READING

• We are all completely beside ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
• La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

LISTENING to podcasts on ABC Radio

WATCHING Killing Eve on ABC iView

Woolwich Dock

WALKING around

• Willoughby
• the Lower North Shore
• Hunters Hill and Woolwich

Cherry blossom in Hunters Hill