Friday 7th September
Book Week is still all GO in primary schools.
Everyone I know has been very creative and inventive.
Rebecca had Ella all dressed up in a Japanese outfit, complete with straight black hair in an elaborate geisha-styled bun. Amazing – Ella has naturally blonde VERY curly hair!! And delicate blonde curly-haired Holly also had black hair and a moustache, for her Willie Wonka get-up. Rebecca said nobody recognised her at all!
Kate managed to get Lizzie Angelina-Ballerina-ed – not such a challenge, Lizzie is already a fairy-like angelinaballerina girl… Harry wanted to go as Mario (from the computer game) and Kate went to great lengths to find a book to go with the costume – this was the requirement, and she managed to find a book of sorts, after much traipsing around the mean streets of Hobart.
Leo didn’t have to go in costume but he did have to find a book with his name in it. Katy ended up sending him to school with the book she had made for him in his first year. It has pictures of him with all of his different family members. His lovely teacher, Sarah, was very impressed, but she told Katy she did find it confusing. How many Uncle Michaels does he have? And…I gave up counting grandfathers and how they fitted in… Our family has so many cross-over generations and so many re-partnerings of the older generations…
(When Hamish, now 12, was a little tacker of about 5, he asked Nicky why he had so many grandfathers. She thought about it carefully and then very sensibly, said, Because you are very lucky. Much better than going into the ins and outs of the oldcodgers’ love lives…)
It’s not just our family, of course. The children in Leo’s prep class come from wildly differing family backgrounds. For example:
- one family with fundamentalist Christian parents, with six children
- one family of seven children with different fathers
- one family with the father in prison
- one family with two mummies and a very kind and involved sperm donor daddy
- a few wildly unreliable if charming hippies
- several blended families
- and just a few mum & dad and one, two, three or four children eg Katy and Jeff…they are indeed very stable in spite of their multiple UncleMichaels/grandparents/in-laws…
All part, as they say, of life’s rich tapestry…
And I still think we're very lucky, though Christmas has become a bit of a nightmare to arrange!
ReplyDeleteDid I tell you about my book week costume? A few of us (6 teachers) dressed up as citizens of the Capitol from The Hunger Games. We had lots of fun wearing outlandish colours, makeup and accessories.
ReplyDeleteI hope no one thought we were inappropriate dressing up as members of a population who derive thrills from watching children fight to the death in an arena?! What an amazing author to write such brilliant and successful books about such a hideous concept. As someone pointed out once it was Lord of the Flies. I was worried about Angus reading it and had a very serious discussion about the concept. Eventually he stopped me and said "Mum I do know it's not real. It would be terrible if it was." phew