Making Missions
27/09/12
Making Missions are activities I occasionally devise for the kids. The missions are Top Secret, but I have been allowed special permission to share them with you here. This one is a creative writing exercise which was really just for Lily.
Making Mission: Be an Alien!
Your mission is to imagine you’re an alien visiting planet Earth for the first time.
You must choose 3 everyday objects from around the house, objects that might be familiar to a human but which your alien eyes are seeing for the first time.
You need to send a report about these objects back to your alien friends.
The report
First choose a name for the object – remember, you don’t know what name humans use for it!
Next describe the shape. Try starting at one end of the object and work your way to the other end, describing the shape and appearance of each part. Remember that because you don’t know how the object is used, you don’t know which parts of the object are more important, so describe each part with equal importance.
Finally you could write an idea about how humans might use the object. You’ve never actually seen a human in person but you have seen photos and videos of them, so you know some basic human features like hands, eyes etc.
Try and make your idea quite different to the real purpose of the object!
Mission Complete!
Once your report is ready you can read it to family & friends – see if they can guess what objects the alien encountered!
Excaliber
24/09/12
Pat, Melanie, Honor & Huw visited for a couple of days last month. Pat shot this video in High Park which has an amazing new wooden castle to replace the one burnt down by vandals.
The rebuild added this irresistible sword in a stone.
Disappointingly it seems that none of our kids is the true king…
Bike rides update
10/09/12
Two weekends ago I got up at 5am, made a flask of coffee, loaded my bike into the car and set off towards Niagara to ride 50 miles for the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada.
Twenty minutes later I realised I had forgotten my helmet.
Just after 8am, after having raced home and back, nearly running out of petrol and getting lost 1 mile from my destination, I arrived and discovered I had lost my sunglasses (probably when I jumped out at that petrol station in the middle of nowhere).
After all those shenanigans the ride itself was really fun. It was a lovely sunny day and I finished in 3 hours.
Since then I’ve still been keeping up with my morning rides, as well as carting the kids around on my Dutch beast, and I’m feeling pretty fit (I even had to buy a smaller belt!)
I don’t have GPS but I’ve tracked lots of rides manually with Google Earth. Here’s a screengrab showing how much territory I’ve covered around Toronto:
A couple of these rides are 30 miles but mostly they’re between 10 and 20. Now to see how long I can keep this up once the weather starts turning colder…