At school in Brisbane

April 1
Sophie and Emily go to Boondall State School. It’s a public school not unlike ours really except that students all wear uniforms and they have several building blocks instead of one building for all. But classrooms look the same, students look the same, they behave the same. Sophie is in grade 4 and Emily in grade 1. Emily’s teacher invited me to come and give a little talk to her class about Canada. Emily was very excited. They’ll be learning about different countries next term. (Term 1 is over this week and then they have a week off before term 2 starts.) It went well. The class was a bit unruly at the start of the morning before the bell rang commencing the instructional day. But after I was introduced and began they were pretty engaged and interested. Charles has some coffee table books of Canada and I had marked a bunch of pictures to show them. The best part was the interesting questions several students asked. They loved the snow pictures because they don’t have any experience of snow here. One boy asked what happens to the flowers when it snows! They ooed and ahhed over the autumn pictures. The same boy asked what the fishermen do on the east coast when it’s winter and there’s ice. And one boy asked wouldn’t we run out of fish. That was one of the difficult boys in the class who surprised his teacher by being very engaged and he told Emily’s mom in wonder about how he’d never met anyone from Canada before. They invited me to come back on Friday afternoon. Their parents are coming for afternoon tea where students will share with them all that they’ve learned about bilbies this term. I was honoured to be asked to come too.

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, I gave the teacher some tips. I told the class about the five point check that students at our school have to do. She really liked that and is using it now with her class. I was impressed that while I was talking she whipped up a journal exercise based on what I was saying for the kids to work on after I left. She was relieved that I picked out the class’s problem child right away and that it’s not only her that finds him a struggle. Oddly enough I was trying to think of who he’d most be like at our school and couldn’t come up with many names. He was definitely familiar but my mind has just drawn blanks on the names. Kinda cool actually.