The Power of Dreams

... or yume no chikara, as I learnt today (that's Japanese, if you hadn't worked it out).

I've had a rather pleasant work-day today, mostly because it involved not actually being at work! Don't get me wrong- I love my job- but it was fun to do something different and take a few hand-selected cherubs off to Big School and take part in a workshop run by Honda.

After having a go at juggling, we settled down to the nitty-gritty of defining a dream. Answers varied from "what you do when you sleep" to the more inspired "something that you wish for", but for me, very simply, a dream is the thing that makes living more than just existing. A dream is something wispy yet solid, far-away yet achievable; a dream raises us from the hum-drum and lets us soar, our hearts singing with the promise of better days to come.

So far, so poetic. But, too often, real-life wakes us up with the metaphorical equivalent of a blaring alarm clock and the knowledge that you've run out of tea-bags. Real life can get in the way of dreams, and I've made excuses along with the rest.

My School Report 2013

With it being that time of year, my thoughts are consumed with writing reports, so naturally I came up with this...

 

End of Year Report for: Louise West

Louise has had an eventful and successful year, though she really should try to concentrate on the task in hand and not procrastinate or flit off to the next shiny thing. Her behaviour is good, if not always predictable, and she should aim to behave herself when in public.

Literacy: Louise spends far too much time reading, and should really pull her head out of trashy horror novels and join in with the world a bit more. Her writing shows promise, and evidence of a warped imagination, but she should aim to make her handwriting legible to others, rather than the indecipherable scrawl of incorrectly-formed letters she demonstrates at the moment.

Friday Five: Five phrases you might see on your child's report- and what they REALLY mean

Summer term. The home stretch. All the tests have been completed, all the paperwork has been filed, and teachers everywhere are relaxing just a little and opting to play rounders in the sunshine with their class instead of teaching them history.

I expect we all have happy memories of summer terms from our own childhood, when it felt like we never did any proper work, and there is a definite sigh of relief when the summer holidays are in sight.

But for teachers, arguably, the hardest task is still to be tackled. The End of Year Report. That little thorn on an otherwise beautiful rose of a term. While children are enjoying weekends free of homework, teachers are shackled to laptops and desperately trying to be constructive and creative in their descriptions of their little darlings. As a writer, school reports are the most challenging test of my craft- finding that delicate balance between honesty and tact, fact and fiction of the white-lie variety.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who writes in code. It's simply not done to be too truthful and blunt; in fact, being British and terrified of offending in even the most basic of situations, euphemisms are a blessing when writing reports. Here are some of the secret codes you might find in your child's report, and what they really mean.

Friday Five: Five pieces of advice...

...from children.

Today I asked my class, in preparation for a writing task, to visualise travelling in the Tardis to visit their future selves, ten years from now.

As well as thinking about what their future selves would look like, where they would live, and what they would be doing, I asked the children to imagine their future self whispered a few words of advice into their ears before they returned to their own time.

Here's what they said.

Friday Five: The Best Jokes I've Heard This Week

Happy Friday, everyone!

 

With all the doom and gloom in the news (and weather) I felt like I needed a little cheering up this week. Lo and behold, in stepped my marvellous children with these howlers. I hope they make you giggle as much as they did me. But then, I do have a nine-year-old's sense of humour...

Desperately Seeking Tea Bags

Do you ever have those weeks when everything seems to happen at once? Yeah, me too. This week has been one of them.

For once, it's not been the result of a self-induced procrastination crisis: I've just been busy. I love my job- I wouldn't do it if I didn't- but this week I have been suffering from a serious lack of "me time". And tea bags...