Our classroom!
Happy days
I had my oral end of course assessment for my French OU course tonight. This year, for the first time, due to cutbacks, the Open University have decided it would be a good idea to save a few bob by scrapping face to face oral assessments. Now, I am a pretty net-savvy chick and I have used virtual learning environments for training and meetings – they are fine, albeit usually a little clunky, but I accept that, notwithstanding their limitations, they have their place.
However, the very idea that it is perfectly feasible to put four people who have never met in a virtual classroom and expect them to converse, in a foreign language, with any credibility is a bloody joke. Firstly, if we are to believe ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’ then 93% of communication is non-verbal – we rely on body language, facial expression and gestures to supplement the 7% we receive via audio. Our virtual classroom had only audio – people speaking and listening via VOIP headsets , no web-cam facility so we were entirely reliant on that 7% of audial input. Hmmm. Not only this but the quality of the audio was poor, in some cases echoey-echoey-choey-ey-ey-ey, in some cases muffled as if they were speaking through a handkerchief (threatening to bomb the OU offices in Milton Keynes perhaps?) and in one case the girl sounded uncannily like Norman Collier doing his famous faulty microphone routine. Hey, what could possibly go wrong?
OK, so the scenario was that we had to give a two minute presentation at a town council meeting speaking about the pros and cons of an assigned type of retail outlet. This part was fine – I’d prepped some natty phrases and delivered my market research findings on ‘les hypermarchés’ with gusto. But the real fun started when we had to have a group discussion about the various options using language of proposal, agreement, disagreement, recommendation, dispute etc. Christ on a bike…I can honestly say we carried off this phony town-council meeting with about as much aplomb and co-ordination as a troupe of blindfolded monkeys on rollerskates, albeit monkeys wearing striped t-shirts, jaunty berets and a string of little onions around their necks. Our tutor is a lovely lady who has been with the OU for many years and is clearly unimpressed by this ridiculous development too.
So, I’d like to thank whichever bright-spark, brown-nosing, budget fascist came up with the idea of scrapping face to face oral assessments for modern language courses with the Open University. Thanks a bloody bundle, pal! Let me take you for a beer sometime….at le virtual pub. I feel a strongly-worded letter coming on.
What could possibly go wrong?
Yes, I am currently obsessed with ‘The Hairy Bakers’. But thinking about it, I’m sure it was J’s idea that we do baking at home-ed group this week, hmmm…she must be psychic! 
Anyway, bake we did and what a lot of fun we had doing it.
We stuck to a very simple sponge recipe from which the children made cupcakes or ‘buns’ as we used to call them in th’olden days (pre-Americanization!) These were artistically adorned with all kinds of tooth-decaying gunk like buttercream, hundreds and thousands and marshmallows.
We mummies were even granted the great privilege of being allowed to decorate a couple too. I’m not sure who had more fun. Actually…I think I know!
2 large eggs, cracked open
1 tsp vanilla essence
125g/4oz caster sugar
125g/4oz soft margarine
125g/4oz self-raising flour
To decorate (optional)
tubes of writing icing
marshmallows
sprinkles
buttercream
1. Heat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4. Put all the ingredients in a bowl and beat them together until the mixture is smooth and slightly lighter in colour.
2. Line a bun tin or cupcake tin with paper cake cases and half-fill each case with the cake mixture.
3. Cook the cakes for 18-20 minutes. You can tell they are done when they have risen up, are golden in colour, and spring back into shape when lightly pressed.
4. Decorate those funky cupcakes, baby!
A fine pair of buns, Missus!
I really must mention to J that her top lip needs waxing...
Cakey Bakey Fun!
One thing C loves is cars. To capitalise on his enthusiasm for all things vehicular we came up with a great little numeracy extension activity.
He set his toy cars out in rows and made price signs for £1, 50p, 20p, 10p, 5p, 2p and 1p. We put some money in a ‘float’ and some money in a wallet. We took it in turns being the car dealer and customer. We kept it quite simple, only buying two or three cars each to begin. He had good fun ’selling’ me the cars, using lots of descriptive language. He had to add up the total price of the transaction and work out how much change was needed.
Because it was something he enjoyed doing it held his imagination and attention for far longer than anything involving picking up a pencil. I have noticed that with pencil and paper activities he is yawning and looking exhausted after only 15 or 20 minutes so we tend to work in very short bursts.
Once he was comfortable and confident with this, I tried another type of transaction. I, as the customer, said that I would like to buy all the cars in his 2p range – how much would that be in total? He quickly worked out 6×2p without realising he was putting his times tables into action. We mixed it up with lots of different variations such as ‘How much would it be to buy all your red cars?’ ‘How much change will I get from £1 if I buy all of your 10p cars?’
This is an activity that could be adapted to suit any child’s interests, the shop could sell anything. I know anything that has C pleading not to have to stop for a break is a winner in my book! I like to think it’s what we’re about…happy learning 
I am beginning to think Spike should have his own blog. He might update it more frequently than I. My blog mojo had gone astray for a wee while, but friends of a lepidopteral bent are keen for a Spike update, so here goes.
Spike has built his cocoon onto the side of the perspex ’suite’ in which we ensconced him. This means that we can see inside his cocoon, although there is a thin film of fibres between the perspex and him, but we can see vaguely what is happening. All his bright orange hair has been shed and some of this is now forming part of his pupal case (although the colour is fading somewhat) and his body has turned a very dark brown colour and looks hard. I found a pic on another blog showing stages of development in a sycamore moth and so, if you look to the right, you can see what Spike looks
Spike's pupal photofit
like now inside his cocoon. I have also added a photo of my own, but as my photography is horribly poor, you can’t see all that much of any clarity, but the oval-ish shape stuck to the perspex in the middle of the container is Spike. It’s all a bit voyeuristic.
I have been reading up and it seems that he may not emerge until around June. His ’suite’ is looking a bit desolate as all the lovely vegetation we put in there has shrivelled up and started to decompose, so he is left with a rather bleak and barren vista. I shall have to do a bit of ‘Changing Rooms’ before he emerges to brighten the place up a bit, make it a bit less depressing. Yes, I actually have found myself worrying about the mental and emotional well-being of a moth. Hmmm.
Spike in his post-apocalyptic wasteland...
As our first season draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time for a list!
We are lottie-newbs so if we can do it, anybody can. Our thanks go to Mother Nature for her gentle, guiding hand. So here, in no particular order, is what we have produced on the allotment this year.
We went out with a couple of friends to a hedgehog sanctuary this week. C is incorporating what he has learned about hedgehogs and hibernation into a mini-project and display about Autumn.
Visiting the hedgehog hospital was a wonderful experience, one which both the kids and us oldies enjoyed. J and I, as well as finding the hedgehogs adorable, were both quite captivated by Elaine who has run the centre, based in her home and various outbuildings, for thirty years.
She is a very Bohemian character, a lady somewhere in her seventies, but with no hint of being ‘elderly’. She was sporting these fabulous skin-tight, patterned leggings, with black leg-warmers and Converse-style sneakers, a cardigan with a wide belt cinched in around her slender waist and her long hair pulled back into a loose pony-tail. For me, she is the very essence of fabulous, natural, shabby-chic. A genuine earth-mother.
Elaine has dedicated her life to the care of animals, particularly hedgehogs, having looked after around twenty thousand of them in her time.
Hedgehogs are brought to the hedgehog hospital after being injured in road accidents, being poisoned, orphaned or otherwise injured. We saw one little fellow who had the end of his nose chopped off by a garden strimmer, and again this is quite common. Elaine patiently nurses and nurtures them back to health and rehabilitates them wherever possible, whereas the RSPCA euthanse hedgehogs in almost all of these circumstances. An orphaned hoglet with need to be fed with a syringe every two hours, day and night, and whereas the RSPCA would just put them down, Elaine will patiently care for them in this way, rearing them into healthy, strong adults. As she herself said, she believe everything has a right to life. What a wonderful, inspirational woman. She recollected some fab anecdotes, she is a real character with a great sense of humour and the kind of person whom you sense could keep you amused all day long with her tales.
As well as her dedication to the centre, which is at her home, she is also an artist. After looking around and meeting some of the hedgehogs, she took us up to see a place that has been made into a kind of garden of remembrance for all those that she couldn’t save. The stained glass window had been painted by Elaine herself and there was a hedgehog prayer carved onto a stone plaque. The whole area felt very peaceful, with only birdsong, and a gentle breeze rustling through the leaves. Like the rest of the place, nothing there was manicured or ordered, it was left to grow wild and natural.
I came away with a whole mixture of emotions. It is rare in this day and age to meet someone so selfless. Meeting Elaine was a great experience, I was left with so much admiration for her and intrigue about her interesting and unconventional life. But nobody can live forever, and I felt sad in the knowledge that one day she won’t be there to do what she has spent the last thirty years dedicating her life to. How many people would dedicate their entire lives to something that lots of people don’t even give a passing thought to? People like that are very, very few and far between.
How cute!?
In memory...
The first thing I did this morning was to check that Spike hadn’t croaked in the night. I was horrified to discover that most of his orange hair was stuck to the side of the container, rendering him nudey. The shed hair looked like a huge, orange monobrow clinging to the glass. I immediately sought solace in the arms of the almighty oracle known as Google – ‘Do caterpillars suffer from stress alopecia’ … Computer says no. However, it seems fuzzy caterpillars do moult at various stages of their development and the final moult takes them into the pupal stage, with their hair being incorporated in the formation of their pupal case.
So, I can breathe easy, for now, as it seems Spike is just preparing to batten down the hatches for the winter. The boys are fascinated to see the process and Spike is seemingly very comfortable with his nudity, making no attempt to hide himself behind a leaf whenever another pair of eyes come peering in the glass at him.
Mum turned up with a little critter to show the boys. He looks like a miniature orange bottle brush, about 4 centimetres in length. Not a caterpillar that either of us had seen before. I checked a couple of nature books, nothing. However, with the power of t’internet, I quickly identified him as a ’sycamore moth’ caterpillar.
It is surprising to see that he will mature from such a striking creature into something so drab (kind of like the ugly ducking, in reverse).
Poor Spike was unaware when he was whisked away from chomping a sycamore leaf, minding his own business, that he was to become a ‘project’. We have been and bought a very large plastic container to keep him in and have read up what is required to provide a caterpillar with an ideal habitat in which to pupate and then emerge in the spring.
Having said that, he was whizzing around his container at breakneck speed earlier and now he is very sluggish, not in a way that suggests he is metamorphosing into a slug, but in a way that suggests he has either knackered himself out or he is not a well caterpillar. I hope he makes it, I could not bear the guilt if he kicks the bucket in the night!
How Spike might one day look (god willing!)
Spike the Sycamore Moth caterpillar
Up until the last week it had all been going swimmingly down at the lottie. Then within the space of a few days we were hit with a double whammy of devastation of our crops. First came an infestation of hungry caterpillars on the brassica bed. The outer leaves of the savoy cabbages rapidly began to resemble lace curtains! Our own fault really, as we should have been picking off the clusters of little yellow eggs and squishing them as fast as those pesky cabbage whites
The accused, at two stages of development...
could lay them, but I don’t really have the stomach for that. So, instead those tiny clusters of yellow eggs became like the elephant in the brassica bed that nobody spoke of. The brussel sprouts are beyond salvation and have been pulled up and destroyed. Now, I am of a generation scarred by the pungent horrors of farty-smelling, mushy, over-cooked sprouts. Never did I think I would mourn their demise, but I am pretty gutted that we have lost them. I have been persuaded by the dulcet Yorkshire tones of Mr J Martin to give them a chance. I was actually looking forward to serving up his ‘Brussel sprouts with pancetta’ alongside the turkey this year. Alas, twas not to be.
So, with the wounds from ‘brassicagate’ still raw it was with a heavy heart that I discovered that we’d lost our entire greenhouse of tomatoes to the blight. The plants were laden heavy with green fruit, and with a few days sunshine they’d have burst forth in a glorious display of reds. Lovely big, juicy ‘moneymakers’ and beautiful, sweet ‘piccolos’. Every single last one had to be destroyed. Blight is a fungal infection and can be identified by dark brown/black patches on the plant stems, brown patches on the leaves and brown, sunken, rotten patches on the fruit. Next year we may have to spray the plants with a copper fungicidal spray as a preventative measure, although we were loathe to do this as, so far, we have grown everything with minimal chemical intervention.
The same disease affects potatoes too, it was this that caused ‘Irish Potato Famine’ of the mid nineteenth century. Thus far (touching wood) our spuds look OK, but we are cutting down the haulms (the stems and foliage) as a preventative measure and will lift the potatoes for storage in the next couple of weeks to put them out of harm’s way.
