First Day, First School (part 2)

Well, that was a day and a half....

Woke up at 6:45 this morning which was lucky 'cause the school principal turned up at 6:50am... Richard was still in his sleeping attire, I'd managed to sneak into the disabled toilets a little earlier but after sleeping on the floor without any sort of mattress I was ready to get up. That's my own fault for leaving the mattress at Mum's place.

Kids started arriving bout 7:15, school bell went at 8:15 (again at 8:25) and most of the kids had turned up by then. Started puzzling at 9, Rich did the older kids and I took the primary school kids... realised about ten minutes before starting that I didn't have some of the stuff to work with - for example, we were placing counters on a 3x3 grid so each row/column/diagonal had one of each colour. So first, i had to get the kids to draw a grid. Which they did to varying degrees of success so it wasn't too bad but some of the kids struggled to put a counter on a severly narrow column... but the other workshop went well by all accounts.

Building bridges was great! They all managed to stay up and hold at least 200ml of water - a couple were solid as a rock and filled the truck all the way up! I think we had the boxes too close together so the bridges didn't collapse as often as i'd expected/wanted. Much more fun to destroy their hard work. Hey, we aren't here to bolster self-esteem, we're here to teach maths!

So after a hard day puzzling, we're off to Bachelor Area school. Hopefully i can buy a pillow (yes, i forgot that too, it's been one of those fortnights and now i'm finally catching up i'm realising everything i missed... d'oh)

Be good

First day, First School

Just arrived in Beluyan (bout 1.5 hour drive from Darwin, to the left, 15k from the coast) and we've been pretty well looked after. Sleeping on the library floor but they have a 80cm tv here so gonna spend the night watching Scrubs and Blackadder.

So not much to really report at the moment. Tommorrow is the first day of indiginous workshops which should be great, my past experiences with aboriginal kids tells me it's gonna be tough work but rewarding.

Borrowed Jamos' camera till mine shows up so will hopefully get a chance to upload some photos this weekend ;o)