Horrid Henry isn’t Horid (by sarah)

There is an article on the BBC news website asking - Should Parents Ban Horrid Henry?, my response to this is... NO.

Horrid Henry is not actually horrid - pretty much as soon as you ask should you ban a book the answer is NO (even bad books that really shouldn't exist should not be banned they should be watered down with lots of other books and besides if you ban them you have just made it more likely that impressionable people will read them as they are now EXCITING, it's what I call the prohibition effect).

The stories have progressions where the kids fight and resolve differences and get around issues such as dyslexia and ADHD etc... and the insecurities that brings for kids etc... they are a positive thing. They also covered headlice and all the other little things that dominate a child's world, yes they contain toilet humour but lets face it 6-12 year olds tend to love that sort of stuff (regardless of gender), just pomp loudly in a room full of kids and you'll see what I mean!

Jean's read all the books and for Mary the Too Cool for School episode/film thingy was immensely important as a confidence builder. In the article the actors main issue was that his kid started kicking up after watching it - my take on that... kids go through phases. Jean started kicking after watching Ben 10 the animation - this was a time to teach that you can't just blanket copy what you see.

Also the books have the easy read high content thing going for them which is exactly what reluctant readers and those with things like dyslexia need. They need a story they can get their teeth into and in this case they will often identify heavily with the protagonist i.e. Henry but it is not so bulksome and wordy that they will feel they are grinding their way through them.

Yay so Horrid Henry is not actually horrid!

The Admin Grind (by sarah)

The science world and the art world are full of forms - in order for me to do an hrs work I have to fill in forms that take me hours and get me stressed - I'm dyslexic (+head injury) it takes me a long time and I often get things wrong, this sometimes costs me chances to work, work I am perfectly capable of doing - admin of one sort or another is currently taking all my time and therefore killing the creativity which it is supposed to be supporting/enabling :/

Admin also has a habit of multiplying - so the more admin I get done - the more appears before me in a kind of sisyphean bog of hate - because yes I hate ADMIN. I hate it so much. I hate the way it gets under your skin and ends up in your dreamscapes or the way it scoops our your mind as you try and balance dates and times and places and equipment costs. I hate how it scritches away at your brain when you are just trying to have a bath or something.

I hate the fact that people want phone calls which are especially hard for me unless I know the person well because you know I have tinnitus continually and that makes hearing hard and I have always done better if I can lip read the person talking anyway - this is a remnant from being almost completely deaf as a small child with glue ear. This means the amount of brain energy/effort I have to put into understanding some one on the phone is astronomical and I it tends to scrub me out. I am happy to meet in person or email but phone calls... GRRRRRR.

I hate that people can be really damn snotty about little typos and spelling mistakes but demand responses instantly leaving no time for me to even consider getting the replies proofed by Al and really that isn't needed anyway - it is obvious what the reply means unlike the jumbles of long winded text that has three small points of information that I need in them. BULLET POINTS or NUMBERED LISTS people!!!! Come on!

So recap things I hate - form filling, phone calls, waffle instead of information and people thinking they can alter events at the last minute and that will just be ok and have no reprucussions at all - like I am only there to serve them - this is mostly a problem in the charity sector where I find people seem to struggle respecting that my time is a resource.

Rant over - now back to admin... I suppose :/

Country File Live photos 2017 (by sarah)

Country File Live was an amazing event with just so much going on - because I was working there I barely got a chance to snap things as I passed - the girls and Al also had a fab time but still felt that they had barely scratched the surface - Jean took photos on her iPad which we'll pop up in a different post. These are the snaps I took on the first day.

This beautiful snake was part of a demonstration including handling by the Oxfordshire Amphibian and Reptile Group (I think!).

I caught this blue dragonfly whilst taking a nap on some bails in front of the bee hive (head injury recovery means I have to take random naps but it is very surreal to conk out in public but I think it's working well).

There was a lake with a wibbly wobbly bouncy but secure temporary bridge across it. It contained various birds and plants coming and going.

There were some great flower displays in the Wild Life Zone.

I love this duck - it is exactly the sort of thing I would buy Al if I had more money 🙂

This bike display cheered me up even though it had just been bucketing it down!

Tractors! I live like machines like tractors.

I love old machines like tractors.

Probably a good job I didn't have more time or there would have been hundred of flower and machine pics!

I'm working on a series of machine colouring sheets for an event in the autumn as well to be fair - but I would have still taken all the photos regardless.

I like the gubbings of machines.

I think they are pretty

These were all from a huge monster of a machine

Many people were taking photographs - elderly men mostly and a press officer.

Everyone feels they need to ask me why I am taking photos of tractors or make jokes about it - this happens at car shows too.

We got Batty with the Oxfordshire Mammal Groups.

And met the cuddly foxes and badgers.

And a squeaky little mouse 🙂

And skulls of said animals - well actually in the photo there is a mouse skull, fox and badger.

Insects also featured heavily including butterfly nets creches, many types of bees and this giant papier mache stag beetle!

Milk churn flower display - this is similar to what I wanted when we lived at The Bakery though I was going to bare paint them so they didn't rust away.

Sheep sculptures - love these though more from a making point of view if I am honest - I remember going to a Garden Show and seeing large metal dragons like this which I adored! If we ever get to do the Salaric Emporium idea and have a tea garden then this sort of thing will be in it (along with dinos and fairies!).

These beautiful yellow water lilies where on the lake.

Loved the giant Go Wild sing 🙂

Water plants on the lake - oh I probably should have mentioned that this was at Blenheim Palace.

The geese kept landing and taking off from the lake and were pretty impressive!

There was plenty of garden ideas - especially those to help you have a greener more wildlife friendly garden - I like this shed but I'm pretty sure ours is falling down and couldn't take the extra strain!

Food is a huge part of the event too - I caught sight of this fab cheese stall!

And Kendal Mint Cake Laqueur!

And to end - more animal sculptures 🙂

Cuddly Science At Country File Live (by sarah)

The Cuddly Science Paleo Posse were really excited to be at Country File Live with the Gloucestershire Geology Trust. They got to perform on the Garden Stage of the Wildlife Zone and do a bit of walk about.

#cuddlyscience is on first! @Saffy @Countryfilelive @BBOWT #excited #puppets #geology pic.twitter.com/5uyevPxHUs

— Glos Geo Trust (@GlosGeoTrust) August 3, 2017

The puppets are Mary Anning, Charles Darwin and Mary Leakey and the associated props where a squid hair clip, a triceratops head piece and a brain hat. And together with the audience we explored evolution, landscape, history and science plus quiet a lot of improve humour in response to the kids 🙂

Walking around with the puppets doing little improve sets to let people know about the actual shows was fantastic - I really love this aspect of it.

Children really do love the puppets - far more than I thought they would when I was designing the general concept! They get cuddled rather a lot. Coraline button eyes and all!

Adults often end up in conversations with them as well!

Mary Anning the puppet did seem to spend a lot of her time searching for her pet squid which the children helped her find - she then explained about cephalopod, belemnites and fossilised ink sacs and how looking at creatures alive today you tell a lot about extinct animals and vice versa.

The squid was most popular and got one little one so excited I ended up giving her one of my My Pet Dinosaurs booklets as well as the colouring sheets as after finding the squid she just kept asking questions and she really was very little 🙂

Mary Anning comes from Dorset so... apparently my accent was "not too bad, a little caricature but better than Poldark" - I'm happy with that 🙂 Though I will say whilst telling kids about the fossils in the Geo Trusts' tent I struggled with some of the dino names!

Kids actually came back for successive shows - this is what I found with the British Science Festival too, which is why I don't like just repeating material and try and swirl it all around a bit even if it is the same characters!

I am very pleased with how Mary Anning has turned out and she is such an easy character to play/envelope and as was said by a fellow story teller at Stroud Out Loud the week before - she's a story telling gift - such a colourful life right from infancy!

She is also a good contrast to the other two characters who hated school as she loved it and worked really hard - this ticks my want boxes of role models/relatable things for as many kids as possible.

The Glos GeoTrust also sent a T-rex out with me to help let people know about the show - which was amazing and lit. got all the kids running over!

Of course the other puppets did also get on stage - though I failed to get a pic of Mary Leakey and the brain hat which is a shame.

Darwin was very popular indeed and had to be rescued and placed back in his cryogenic chamber due to the kids wanting to play (I may need to re attach some hair!).

Big thankyou to the Glos Geo Trust and Country File Live and my lovely sound engineer who did tell me his name but I have since forgotten :/

Inbetween rests and performances I also helped out at the GeoTrusts tent - this contained both the Gloucester and Oxfordshire Geological Trusts and contained so much fun stuff!

Geo-Entertainments: when dealing with the public and geology - especially where kids are involved you tend to end up pulling out the dinosaurs. I know myself that the big things for me as a kid were finding my own bits of nature... sticks, feathers, shells, stones and fossils followed by the absolute WOW!!!! moment of the five year old me walking into the Natural History Museum London and seeing Dippy standing there. This was a huge dino skeleton reconstruction and dominated the great hall as you wandered in. I just remember the awe and the silence that enveloped me when what it was was explained. This began my dino madness which was fuelled further by films such as the Land Before Time and Jurassic Park.

The Gloucester Geology Trust knowing their local geology and what engages people have a lot of dino stuff on hand!

These photos are Dr Alice Kennedy showing people the T-rex reconstruction skull, it is one quarter the size of an actual t-rex skull because you know it has to actually fit in a car to be taken to shows, schools and events! (p.s. yes you can get your local Geo Trust to come into your school for talks and workshops, some even have funding to help with this!).

And of course there was the dino-dig! Excavation digs ie sandpits do seem to be really popular with kids (as the Archaeology Festival proved for Cuddly Science).

And who could forget the inflatable dinosaur!

Yes it's planting a tree 🙂

Yes it went for a walk with a bee!

I believe it was an Oxford Friends of the Earth bee but I would not swear to it.

There was a swarm of the things!

But dinosaurs what not the only thing they had bought:

The Geo-Trusts had an amazing array of rocks, fossils, maps and reconstructions with them, including a hadrosaur head banging bit and the Buckland Megalosaurus jaw (yes I know more dinos but shhh). There was a mix of fossils and reconstructions, not to mention a map or two.

Fossil shrimp! Just look at the preservation on this little fellow!

I loved this cute velociraptor skull which got me into many an argument with kids who've seen the Jurassic Park Franchise films but have yet to delve deeper into the mists of deep time and dino-lore!

People who have known me and Al for a while will know we call each other polyp and kids as well... this is because when we first started going out I'd just started my paleo-biology module and was fast becoming obsessed with colonial and modular organisms such as bryozoans and corals (and plants for that matter). Polyps are the little creatures (v. similar to zooids) and I explained the concept to Al and he would pretend to be in a polyp tube and so on... This is why I got rather over excited at these fossil corals etc... 🙂

On one of my University interviews - Birmingham I think - I was given a fossil to try and identify - I thought it was a coral. It wasn't it was a mammoth tooth dredged from the English channel (I think it was a long time ago!). This misidentification burned what a mammoth's tooth looks like into my brain and thus when I saw this little one I knew what it was instantly (I still checked though before telling kids that that was what it was!). I never got to do the vertebrate paleo module which made me very sad and working that the Natural History Museum I was limited to the projects I was working on so didn't really get a broad look at macro/large fossils. The thing that looks like a shiny slither of tree is - it is fossil wood 🙂

Dino-Roar! This is a view into the T-rex reconstruction skull - it is angled slightly upwards so you can really see the shape of the teeth. The Natural History Museum used to have little workshops on working out what you could tell about an animal from the skull/teeth/eye sockets ie diet, predation and social structure so I may have wibbled about this to the kids a lot.

Shiny sand dollar! Look at that five fold symmetry!

Glos Geo Trust also had fossil making with plaster of paris with moulds from actual fossils, and a badge maker. And the Ox Geo Trust has 3D dino skull masks and little dino puppets which I sadly failed to get any photos of because to be quiet frank it was really quiet busy!

Paleo Posse (by sarah)

Cuddly Science now has a Paleo Posse - very similar to the Awesome Archaeology team but with the addition of Darwin and some special head gear 🙂

So we have Mary Anning known as the Princess of Palaeontology who was a poor girl from Dorset who made her name collecting and studying fossils - she's the one in the bonnet and has a squid head piece accompanying her as she discovered fossilised ink sacks and would study modern creatures to see how they compared to the fossil creatures she was finding!

Then there is Charles Darwin who came up with the theory of evolution, he had many adventures on the high seas and was massively influenced by the new geological finds that were coming from people like Mary Anning and the Bone Wars! Where there were fights over the fossils bones of dinosaurs and were to find them! He has a reconstruction of a dino head with him.

Lastly but not least is the archaeologists, physical anthropologists and paleo-anthropologist Mary Leakey who worked on everything from Roman ruins to iron age sites to neolithic caves complete with stunning cave paintings to finding the remains of what appear to be the ancestors of humans paving the way for more insight into how our brains evolved. There is a brain hat to help her explain!

The paleo posse are preparing for their first outing as a team to Country File Live (2017).