The night before a new term

A beating heart. A tight stomach. A headache.

I am so nervous of starting the new term: Starting with training Maths Olympiad students for the second round, then Music for all the Grade 4-7 (who do not want to sing)… and then it is only 8:20 and the Maths, Science, Digital Literacy and Life Skills AND extra Maths for the struggling students still lay ahead.

I am overwhelmed and the race has not even begun yet.

Returning home, I will be spending time with my three year old. I love him with my whole heart but I struggle with being an adequate friend and a respectable mom who will be able to raise a smart, active, self-actualized person with the social skills that I lack and the motivation, skills and opportunities to succeed in an immensely competitive world.

Let’s face it, we are no longer preparing our children to compete with other children, but to compete with AI.

And all this with a bank account that is already in the red.

I am so afraid!

I hope the view from the top will be worth the climb!

A bit of theatre under the oak trees

It is wonderful how many affordable treasures we have in Johannesburg right under our noses.

I remembered that I took my students to the National Children’s Theatre (https://www.facebook.com/groups/117104588327503/?ref=share) to watch the Cat in the Hat and we all enjoyed it thoroughly.

I decided to see what they were performing over the Easter Weekend and was delighted to see that it was Peter and the Wolf.

They mentioned that, because of Covid, they are performing in their outdoor theatre. Mmmm… I had a few reservations and doubts, but it was very affordable, so I booked the tickets for the 9:30 am show for myself, my husband, my son and my mom.

My son (and his mom) were delighted to have an opportunity to have a picnic. We were all prepared by the evening before the show.

We arrived to beautiful green lawn, lovely shady oak trees and a quant little stage in what looked like half of a giant acorn, all rounded off by cheerful music.

We all dug into our picnic snacks, but once the show started my son was transfixed. He had no interest in the snacks any more. My pretty busy, active son stood in one place for an entire hour. He was fascinated by the sounds, the acting and the story. And so were we.

I felt completely and utterly blessed to have access to such lovely small delights. We will definitely visit them again!

Drama under the oak trees

A day in the South African sun

Ah! It is school holidays and we took our son on his first cable car adventure!

He loved it!

We drove around an hour from Johannesburg to Magaliesberg, where the cablecars are. The hour went by in no time. We sang. We appreciated the dwindling city life as we ventured into the country side, had a few healthy snacks and were excited to see the tall, ‘real’ mountain.

We were almost surprised when we got to the end of our journey and parked in front of the majestic mountain.

We bought our tickets and waited patiently in line for our turn to be santised.

Not long and it was our turn to get into our personal little car.

It was beautiful to see how green the trees and grass were in an area that can tend to be on the dry side. We enjoyed the ride up a lot and I just (selfishly) indulged in how wonderful it is to have a child and being able to see everything through young eyes again… just when I was starting to get used to life and less sensitive to its beauties, wonders and small pleasures.

We relished in the luxury of stretching our eye muscles as we stood on top of the Magaliesberg. We could see all the way to the Hillbrow Tower in Johannesburg as we lifted our gaze upwards and away from the sparkling Hartebeespoortdam fed by the Crcodile river. Our son was relieved to learn that there are no crocs in the river.

After some lunch at the restaurant at the top, a bit of a walk, looking at the backs of the soaring black-backed vultures and blue slush puppy at the kiddies play area, we headed back to the station to board our cable car for the trip down.

We were a cheerful little family as we headed back to Johannesburg!

Looking at the cable car station at the top

A celebration of cooperation

We decided that we needed to breathe a bit bit of life into our building at school, so my Grade 5 and 6 class agreed that tessellations would be challenging, fun and pretty…. and of course a break from numbers.

We had two practice runs where they were completely dumbfounded that their ‘random’ shapes could fit into each other on all four sides. The real fun began when I challenged them to turn their random shape into something recognizable. My effort looked a bit like the Twitter bird, so that just set their imaginations on fire. We had camels, frogs, monsters, cows!

After they all designed their tiles, we numbered each tile and put them on the wall for the whole school to see and we gave a day for everyone to vote for the top ten.

The top ten was selected and from there on, both Grades and children worked randomly to create the tessalations. It was like a relay race! And I am so proud of them. I think their efforts are a celebration of cooperation.