Culturally integrated too

'The streets on my N-scale layout'

The wheels on the bus go round and round

‘Come on, who wants to sing a song that you sing at home with Mum or Dad?’

That is what my colleague and I asked our multi-lingual group of 3 to 5 year-olds during the last fifteen minutes of the recent block of sessions in the integrated Kindergarten.

We had five children with us and five languages so we expected to hear German French, Arabic, Russian or Turkish.

Tears in my eyes

We had one hand go up and what joy it was to hear the five-year-old Russian girl sing, in perfect tune, with wonderful English pronunciation and with all the actions, several verses of The Wheels of the Bus go Round-and-Round! We had actually expected a Russian song from her so to get a delightful performance of this popular English children’s song was a bonus to round off another lovely morning at work. It was extra special for us as we considered the difficult start that this child has had in her life. She is now thriving in our Pető/Montessori integrated, and international, Kindergarten.

This group changes each year, children come from the crèche or from home and others go off to school but, however many changes there are, the group seems to get more international and multi-lingual than ever. At the moment there are five Pető children and two conductors, this gives us a total of seven people with seven languages, with all but one speaking German as their second language.

Life is certainly interesting in our work.

As well as disability becoming something not at all unusual for our little ones being foreign is not at all foreign to them either, if you know what I mean.

In the whole group of fifteen children we also have a child with one Mum from Tanzania and another with Dad from South America.

Out of ten members of staff there are also many countries represented. Hungarians are in the majority, with four and there are three Germans. There is a lady who is French, another from Irak, and me.

I think it is about time we put on a show that presents the international-ness of our integration, perhaps we wiill then hear the Russian children's song that we were hoping to hear this week!

Films at the Congress 8 and elsewhere

"East Anglian skies", 2013

Rehabilitation, upbringing and more, all on film

There will be a CE Cinema at the Congress, I have no idea how I will get time to watch a film, although I expect they will be short films so it might be possible to visit the cinema for 15 minutes each day if I plan well and do not chat too much!!!

As I write I am listening to a review on BBC Radio Four’s Front Row, of a documentary film that was premiered in January 2013, a film that I will certainly make an effort to see in a real-life cinema –

The Crash Reel –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crash_Reel

WCCE 2013 (conductive upbringing – that is what it is all about!)

Last days of summer in Norwich, September 2013

A continuous journey

I am so glad that I encouraged the organisers of the 8^th World Congress for Conductive Education to invite attorney Ralph Strzalkowski to take part as a keynote speaker, and, after difficulties in getting the initial communications started, so happy that he accepted. Ralph has already started his journey from Florida to Europe and he is already getting lots of publicity back home.    

                                    

I received this Google Alert three times today –

http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1499020

I have been following Ralph’s story’s since he began blogging and I was pipped-at-the-post when Conductive Education Press got in there first with an offer to publish a book containing an edited selection of his postings. I would have loved to have had the honour of re-telling Ralph’s stories in one of my narratives in my book series Conductive Lifestyles, but it does not matter who publishes it what is important is that Ralph’s story gets written and heard. The book should be available at the Congress, you can read about its making on Ralph’s blog –

http://blog.lawyeronwheels.org/2013/09/the-intro.html

You can read about Ralph’s preparations for his journey on his blog too and also get to know him a little bit and begin to wonder what stories he might be narrating in his Keynote speech. I, for one, am very much looking forward to meeting and hearing him next week.

Just a few more snippets about the book and the travelling

http://blog.lawyeronwheels.org/2013/07/my-book-revisited.html

http://blog.lawyeronwheels.org/2013/09/next-stop-europe.html

http://blog.lawyeronwheels.org/2013/08/the-title.html

And this is one of my favourites –

http://blog.lawyeronwheels.org/2013/09/re-learnng.html

It is so hot on the Continent this summer

There are few ‘pastures green’ on the Continent at the moment

Although it is almost a quarter of a century since I left England and its pleasant pastures green, to live ‘on the Continent’ I still find it difficult to function properly when the temperature rises steadily in the direction of forty degrees Celsius.

It is lovely to cycle every day in the sun and feel the warmth seeping through my skin right through to the bones but for a fair-skinned English person like me it is sometimes a bit too much. I sometimes find it necessary to hide away in the coolness of my flat and go out only in the cooler (by a couple of degrees) hours of the evening. That is what I did last weekend when I had concerts and opera visits on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings but for most of Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday I hid away in my sandstone flat. Indoor temperatures unusually rose higher than the outdoor temperature by Sunday, but luckily in the evening a short rain storm, accompanied by a fresh breeze, cooled the air and the flat.

My tree-shaded balcony

I slept outside on my balcony last weekend, for as long as the hardness of a deckchair with its foot-rest allowed. I managed about four hours in the fresh air and it was lovely – the first cool sleep for weeks. 

The cushion reads - 'Cats sleep anywhere'

I slept out there again last night and realized that, although the collared doves have left their nest in the tree that surrounds my balcony, I still have neighbours; there were blackbirds fluttering around above me chirping in the darkness as I tried to sleep – now I know why there was a shiny, greenish-black feather lying on my chair during the week.

Candle light

Mad dogs and Englishwomen!

Yesterday in the noon-day sun I cycled a round-trip of 25 kilometres in order to welcome another conductor and her family to our fold. The team of Magyar men had already completed the unloading when I arrived, just in time for cooling drinks, pizza and tri-lingual conversations.

Oh how I love my conductive lifestyle

I cannot imagine anymore what it was like to live in just one culture, with only one language ringing in my ears. At work with the children we add Dutch, Turkish, Russian, French, and Spanish, to the German, English and Hungarian of my conversation yesterday.

Keeping a cool head

The temperatures were already up in the mid-thirties when I woke this morning so today I will stay-put in my coolish living room where I will carry on with my presentation-writing for the WCCE 2013.

Notes

England’s pleasant pastures/mountains green – And did those feet in ancient time a poem by William Blake from his epic Milton a Poem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time