Free Children

Reason #573 in Why Our Children Don't Go To School, an occasional series.

The West Australian government will ban jeans and other denim clothing from all state schools from next year.

State Education Minister Ljiljanna Ravlich says denim is associated with "having a good time" and has no place in primary or secondary schools.

Heaven forbid that anyone should think they are at school to have a good time, of course. The full article here.

About a week or so, I showed B this photo: of an astonishing recreation, in Lego, of Escher's lithograph Relativity. It led to a discussion of making all kinds of Lego creations, including the Dr Who supervillains, the Daleks. We searched, and found various links (displaying a greater or lesser degree of obsessiveness on the part of their creators *g*). B printed out the instructions for how to make daleks from this site, and found another which looked rather more easily achievable, albeit less convincing, but my personal favourite has got to be this chap's gallery. Plus, when I went back to the original photo and followed some of the other links, I found a link to this site. More people doing scary things with Lego...

Getting away from Lego, the discussion reminded B of the jigsaw puzzle version of the Escher print which we had seen a while ago and failed to follow up. Having finally tracked one down, I think I may have to add this to our birthday wishlist *g* In the course of writing this entry I have also found the official M C Escher website, and been reminded of this fun, interactive site, which we played around with last year but haven't thought of for a while. There's enough to keep us busy for a while!

My Butterfly Alphabet poster arrived today. I first read about this in a newspaper article years ago, thought it was cool, and more or less forgot about it. Then I saw a link to it posted on an unschooling forum late last year, and went to check out the website. I squeaked and bounced about it sufficiently excitedly in my beloved husband's hearing to convince him that it would be an excellent Christmas present. And it was. Now I just have to decide where to hang it...