Monkeez.org

(Work in progress).

Jenni Russell has written this piece on what might be going wrong in education.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/28/education.labour

"On the day before the Commons rose last week, the government quietly issued its response to the children's select committee, which had spent months taking evidence on whether the focus on testing was distorting children's education. The committee's report had been thorough and merciless. It concluded that while England needed a testing system, the existing one was damaging. It turned students off learning, and was in urgent need of reform."

and…

"This culture of brazen denial comes right from the top. In an interview last month, Balls was asked about the fact that, in most schools, even seven-year-olds spend much of their year being anxiously coached and drilled in Sats techniques. They are put under such pressure because teachers' jobs and schools' futures depend on good results. That's the system of reward and punishment his department has constructed. But Balls simply denied it was true - and claimed he would be horrified if it were."

I managed to get a nice little Palm Z22 cheap a couple of days ago, which gives us the opportunity of paperless caching. We’ve been out a couple of days this half-term with it and it’s almost revolutionary!.

Using Pocket Queries (PQ) you can download a lot of geocaches in one file, and then run them through a nice application called GPXSpinner. This looks at each cache and creates some nice html for it. This html is then parsed through to plucker which parses all the html and creates nice links between all the pages and then creates a .pdb file which can be installed on the palm (and viewed with plucker’s own viewer).

We were out today, and because we had a nice database of caches on the palm, could roam around with all the information we needed. Cool

kingswood_tower

Originally uploaded by kabads

I’ve just returned from Kingswood, an activity centre on the Isle of Wight. It was pretty exhausting, with activities starting around 9:30 am (with an early rise for breakfast) and then finishing at 9pm.

The children thoroughly enjoyed the activities, including Quad-biking, archery, climbing, zip-wire, abseiling (both from the tower in the photo) and Night-line (following a length of rope whilst blindfolded).

Wave those flags

Originally uploaded by kabads.

Happy birthday Pete – sorry it’s taken us a whole week to sort this pic, but it’s worth it. Hope you got some sleep in the end. Trugs, Ads, Treasure and Zakster.

See last.fm

Isaac wants to show you the boat he made out of Jenga blocks.

Click the image for the full version.

Get it here.

Joe frightened me with this picture last night, carefully placed in the bathroom (all his own work).

The boys appeared last week on Meridian news which ran a piece on them winning the funniest grandchildren competition.

I came home to find Meridian senior presenter, Keith Malone, sat in my front room watching England win the Ashes!

As ever, the pics are available (password required).

We went for a walk in some nearby bluebell woods.

See the pics here (password protected).

Today, we all went on the Mid Hants Watercress railway for a steam trip to Alresford. Being on a real steam railway was a real treat for the boys and they enjoyed the old-fashioned carriages. We stopped off at Alresford for tea and then caught the last train back.

See the pics. (password required.)

Last week we spent the Easter week at Tenby with all the Fair Oak lot. We stayed at a lovely cottage near St. Florence. It was a huge cottage sleeping 12, with 6 adults and 6 children in.

The highlight of the week was the boys learning to swim without armbandsin the pool. They got very confident by the end of the week and enjoyed strutting their stuff round the pool. Joe even swam lengths of the pool.

We also managed to visit Pembroke Castle which the boys loved running and climbing around, pretending to be Sir Lancelot and Sir Galahad.

Folly Farm also received a visit, proving to be very popular, especially the fun-fair rides.

We also visited Heatherton park where the boys spent ages on trampolines and playing with the diggers in the sand.

Top all that off with a couple of days at the beach and you had the recipe for an excellent holiday.

Pics are here. (password required).

We’ve just got back from the Fun Factory, where the boys had their first go on a vertical slide. They were scared at first and went down with daddy, holding hands, but after that they were well away.

Last Saturday we went out for Shep’s birthday to a local curry restaurant. There was an impromptu Cloth foto session, with plenty of hot curry left over.

View the party here. (password required)

Yesterday Phillipa, our babysitter from where we used to live, came and visited us and we all went to Milestones. We had a great time and would thoroughly recommend it for anyone who has school aged children.

You can have a peek at our milestones pics to give you some idea of what it is like.