Lunch at Redberry Farm

On Friday we went strawberry picking at Redberry Farm! It was a marvelous outing, and very reasonably priced at R15 for a small bucket, and R25 for a big bucket.

It was nice and shady in the strawberry tunnels...

Unripe strawberries - the farm utilises crop rotation to make sure there are plenty of ripe ones in all the open rows though - and the beautiful strawberry flowers. But still more exciting is when you strike gold, with some perfectly ripe, juicy fruits.

Bingo!

 Yarhar, don't be stealin' my strawberries matey!

Buckets of strawberry goodness... Have I overloaded my container?

As you can see, the small buckets were quite large enough, but they didn't last long when we got back to the tearoom. There is something magical about still warm, freshly picked berries.

And then, because we weren't already spoiled enough, we had a simply delicious lunch, eaten against the spectacular backdrop of the Outeniqua mountains...

And although there were strawberries with everything (check out the strawberry garnish on my chips!), my favourite was still the jam-packed fresh strawberry milkshake.

2013? Really?

Hello everyone!

So apparently it's 2013 already - and the internet is full of focus words, resolutions and general planning goodness. Far be it from me to buck the trend.

(Some of you may have noticed that I've killed Out of Perspective - splitting my attention was a silly idea in the first place. But I did import all the posts, so nothing lost!)

So, on to some of what 2013 holds for me:

teaching english

Yes, this year I am teaching THREE English classes (grade 8, 9 and 10) and only TWO Maths classes (grade 9 and 10). While this is a good thing (I've been wanting to wriggle into English teaching, and yay! no grade 12s), it is also a VERY VERY stressful thing. I've been teaching Maths for almost three years. How much experience do I have teaching English?? Zip, zilch, nada...

Prep time!

teaching maths

So I'm still teaching a fair bit of Maths though, and will continue to lead the grade 9 Maths team at my school, which means a lot of resource creation and general admin. I'm pleased with the plans we've set in place to tweak the ordering of the syllabus, and this year I will be teaching a top-set grade 9 class - yay! Last year I had all mixed groups in terms of Mathematical ability - pretty demoralising when at least half my kids failed every exam. So although I enjoy teaching kids who struggle with Maths, it will make a nice change. 

As good as a holiday? We'll see. This past holiday will be pretty hard to beat.

family

...which doesn't only consist of my cats, believe it or not!

My younger sister is getting married in April (yikes), and then moving to England with her beloved! Very exciting times, but also a bit sad and definitely stressful. So this year will be full of family things, at least for the first part, and I want to try and prioritise them as much as I can...

"Family" also covers my mini family (husband + two cats) and home, and trying to leave work earlier as often as possible (5pm, please? maybe??) so that I can spend time at home and hopefully not leave such chaos behind me when I go to bed at night.

creativity

Last year I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time, and absolutely LOVED it. So come November 2013, all else being equal, I will NaNoWriMo again! Yay!

But I also want to get into the routine of getting creative work going regularly throughout the year, starting with the editing of Mending Hedges (my NaNo novel from 2012). I've also got some other interesting plots and plans up my sleeve but we shall see... dum, dum, dum...

ALSO, I want to get back to a more regular blogging schedule. To that end, I want to stop putting pressure on myself to create one type of post or another at any particular time - just to write and create whatever springs to mind based on current events. Realistically, I will be trying one general post and/or one writing post per week (depending on work situations). Mainly posting on Saturdays, as far as I can make out my schedule, but obviously trying to gather material throughout the week and mainly construct the posts over the weekend.

Anyhow, I'll give it a decent effort for the first little while, and hope to hold up my end when the school work gets tougher.

sjoe!

I think that's quite enough resolution-type things for me for one day...nap time?

I need a holiday!

more pictures to daydream about...

Punting Down the Cam

[WARNING: this is a sentimental post about bygone days...*sniff*]

I believe I am actually a child of the 20s. Probably my favourite novel of all time is Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, set in beautiful Oxford in the stately interwar days when women had just been admitted to universities and everyone still wore academic dress to College dinners... And, of course, when the best Sunday afternoon activity was to take a leisurely punt down the river. Sigh.






When I was fortunate enough to be sponsered on a "literary tour" of the UK a few years back, one of my most favourite outings was when we went punting. It certainly made a nice change from yet another stately home... Though Blenheim et al are stupendously magnificent, they are also terribly hard on the feet.








Not that punting is an art for the lazy. For those of you that don't know, punting is the art of pushing a boat down the river by means of a long pole prodded repeatedly into the muddy river bed and used as a lever.

Apart from negotiating bridges which are mainly too low to get the pole (or yourself) through upright, one also has to cope with steering (mainly with the assistance of the ardent paddlers) and going upstream. Going upstream is mostly a case of one punt forward - two floats back.


 

And of course: very HOT work (unless you fall in, which I fortunately didn't!) ... By the end of the outing I was much thinner, mainly due to removing layers of clothing!

Nonetheless - oh to return to those stately days...

Counting at the Seaside

I'm on holiday folks, so no hectic maths for a bit... instead I've been collecting pictures of numbers. Today I counted from 0 to 5 on and around the beautiful beach at Muizenburg.

 Hum...the usual problem with "counting" zero. Am I encroaching on hectic maths after all?

One clock-tower on Muizenburg station. Not one o'clock.

Two walking people (husband and father-in-law if you must know)

Can you spot the three?

Four beach huts...

Five (or is it six?) steps gone adrift...

Car Games

Some Variations on "The Number Plate Game"...

The Original: spot all the numbers from 1 to 100 (in order) on car number plates. The digits must be in the correct order and not separated.

Fibonacci: spot all the fibonacci numbers (stop at 144 - otherwise it gets too difficult!). The same rules apply.

Hint - the Fibonacci sequence of numbers works like this. Each term of the sequence is the sum of the previous two terms. It starts 1; 1; 2; 3...

Prime Numbers: spot all the prime numbers between 0 and 100. 

Hint - a prime number is only divisible by one and itself. 1 doesn't count as a prime number.

Squares:
Cubes:
Powers of Two:
Powers of Three:

The variations are endless. After some experimentation however, I suggest you stop when you get to three digits. Otherwise it takes so long to get the next number in the sequence that everyone loses interest!

Happy long weekend! I wish you a festive lack of traffic.

Feeling Even More Special

So what did I do with my birthday?

Well I went to work...and it was AWESOME!

Here are some pictures of what happened, all at school, and most from students.

 

 Lots of messages from various students and classes...

 A card from my grade 9 class

A little party in my classroom with my family after school...

And it's not even over yet...

Feeling Special

This post has nothing to do with English or Maths...but everything (I suppose) to do with teaching.
Teaching is the best job in the whole world, despite occasionally and temporarily being the worst job in the whole world.

So tomorrow is my birthday. And today my grade 12s threw me a surprise birthday party.

Don't get me wrong, we still worked. Hard. But at the beginnning of the lesson I was presented with some cooldrink, and biscuits and chips and sweets and best of all, a birthday balloon covered with messages from the class:

So guys...this one goes out to you: Zintle, Akeelah, Aqeela, Kristi, Brent, Saphron, Tariq, Benzly, Kyle, Greg, Dhanyal, Bevanee, Songezo, Gcina, Brian and Boeba.

You rock!