We’re nearing the end of another school year here in Oslo. And as with much of Europe at the moment, the weather is glorious. It’s 7.30am and it’s 26 C out there with blasting blue-skied sunshine. For the last few weeks, it’s felt like we’ve shifted 3,000 km to the south of Spain somewhere. Until you go for a swim in the sea, that is and then you’re under less of an illusion that you have moved from the freezing north.
People are changing colour before my very eyes as their skin gets darker. I myself am firmly under the impression that even my white Irish pallor is getting a tan. I can hold on to this impression, belief even, as long as I don’t stand within three metres of any other human around here. The husband has turned towards the sun approximately four times and is inexplicably tanned. The kids come home looking healthier by the day, even the little one with the Irish skin like her mamma is changing shade. The only reasonable course of action for me is to go off people for a while I reckon – you know stand alone, literally. If I do have to have family outings, I can walk five steps ahead and use the mobile phone for urgent contact. A woman has got to hold on to some self-delusion somehow.
It’s that nice time of year when we’re sliding towards summer and the summer planning is underway. We’re almost through the school year which means …. yes… a slight thrill for all involved… we’re almost through with homework for a while. For the first time, we had two kids at school this year so it’s been an interesting year adapting to a new rhythm. Now I’ve no problem with homework per se, in fact I think the kids actually really learn stuff through it. How to drive Mom and Dad a bit nuts is an unintended by-product but it’s right up there towards the top.
The secondary benefits to the iPads would be actually learning real things like spelling words, how to compose and write sentences, do hard sums, read BIG words in Norwegian and English. And so much more like whizzing around an iPad, what is the world and what’s the point of chickens. How to annoy the hell out of a sibling is another good one we can boast about in our house, arguing about things like who’s going to sit where to do homework and my all-time favourite which is, who has more homework and who finishes first. Every day, Monday to Thursday. Joy and harmony.
Both kids had their own designated iPads this year, with funding extended for the school after initial trials some years ago showed that they had huge learning benefits. I love the school iPads and I think the kids are fortunate to have them as a learning tool. The pencil case, paper, copy books, reading books are still sacrosanct but the iPad adds a new dimension as a way to cascade shared information like weekly homework plans and books. Not to mention the dozens of cool apps carefully selected to support learning in each subject; this year our boy has been translating online English books into Norwegian as homework every week. I think it resembles what I was doing in German class when I was old enough to have a driving licence.
They also use the iPad for recording their reading, something I wrote about on this blog some time back. For anyone who remembers, we had a designated ‘recording studio’ in the house when the boy was in first class and god only help the person who sneezed, opened a door or even breathed a bit too loudly when the recording was underway. The Studio is still there and the same behavioural rules and limitations apply. Except now there are TWO kids. Thankfully, they didn’t have to record on the same day this year, so they took it in turns to terrorise the rest of the house with their shouts of “Be Quiet!” and “I’m starting NOW” on alternating days. Usually there’s a parent sitting with them as a very silent sound engineer and general post-production editor.
Their respective teachers then listen to the recordings and leave encouraging messages for them to say well done and keep up the good work. That’s quite a job for them too, listening to every recording and commenting. The youngest went off into her room with her iPad the other evening, insisting that she wanted to ‘be alone’, making a bolt for independence that I couldn’t argue with. I listened to the recording afterwards and I’d swear she had a little nap in the middle of a sentence, there was that much of a gap. It must be fun for the teacher alright.
So, we’re looking forward to a break from all that excitement and then the ramp up to a whole new year where the homework load increases but hopefully to an equal and opposite degree that the kids become independent and require less ….erm…. encouragement and loving patience, I suppose you’d call it….. to get their homework done.
But for now it’s time to work on the darker shade of pale again on another hot day here and grab as much opportunity as possible to load up on Vitamin D. The t-bane or underground rail trains are like saunas and there’s a ban on all barbecues or fires in outdoor public areas because everywhere is so dry. After a long, long winter of almost eight months, the persistent, relentless heat is very welcome I reckon, for another while anyway.
