Ret-uk - Untitled Travels

These works clearly demonstrate that it is the novelist rather than the theoretician who is best able to capture the relationship between the urban environment and human behaviour

Merlin Coverley in 'Psychogeography' when talking about JG Ballard, questioning some of the work of Debord and the Situationists...

Finale of the fantastic spoken word event that was part of the crystal palace overground festival! Glad I went. Would be great to have some park related spoken word in the audio trail.... Ill look into it. Time to sleep ready for the full on festival day tomorrow...

Mental Wealth

September 2016

Emmie, Keith and I (as Sound Tracks) had a great time leading a workshop at the 2016 Mental Wealth Festival. The festival was held at City Lit, Covent Garden and was jointly hosted by City Lit and Beyond Words. We had the opportunity of meeting a variety of professionals in the world of learning disability and presented some of the ideas from our new sessions: Around the World in 80 Minutes.

Keep an eye out for it next year - as I am sure there will be lots of interesting talks and workshops at no or a low fee.

https://www.mentalwealthfestival.co.uk 

Me in the World

October 2016

Hello there :)

Testing out writing a bit more regularly about what I do in my tutoring, music and storytelling sessions. I would be interested to hear if any of it is useful to anyone reading this.

So the first activity that I am going to talk about is a one I found through a search of Montessori blogs. It is called a 'Me on the Map' or 'Me in the world' activity. It is an activity I didn't come across when I was Montessori teaching a few years back. However, when searching for activities about the world I really liked the idea of this. An important part of Montessori philosophy for me is the area of cultural education. Montessori was very much dedicated to peace and the activities in this area really develop this through helping children to understand more about the world, their place in it and how everything is connected.

I tried this activity out with two brothers I tutor. The idea is that you have coloured circles of ascending sizes. You start by asking the child to draw a picture of themselves and then their house and gradually progress to their continent and the world.

The youngest started accordng to the plan. He wasn't too keen on drawing his houseso drew the entry gate to his house. We only did about three last week and completed this week because the activity did not captivate him as much as others. The eldest decided that he would do it in his own way and started with a mean looking character who ended up living on the moon. He gave areas of the moon different number codes that got more complex as they went along and really got into it. I had intended that he did it about himself, however, I loved his creativity. Below are the results. And here is a link to the page I found the best for describing this activity and variations:  Here

Bye for now....

From Mile End to Victoria Park... and a bit before....

A visit to the Highline Park

‘Rosie’s Walk’ encouraging the kids to copy and create doodles to create a similar style to the book :) Native Speaker Teacher in a Vienna Primary School...

Finally at MoMA after two years of hearing & reading about it & Loic Tallon's work on my MA Museums & Galleries in ed course & conferences :)

Psychogeography: The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals.

From Internationale Situationniste #1, Knabb, pg 45 in 'Psychogeography' by Merlin Coverley, 2010