Ampersand Duck

Pre-amble ramble

The other day I walked into the Principal’s office (where I’ve been stashing my bag of a day) and she asked me what I’d learned that day. What haven’t I learned!  The school’s motto, Together we learn, together we grow, is a philosophy I really support, as any of my adult class participants would tell you. I often learn as much from my students as they learn from me.

When I was in NZ this time last year, my main learning outcome was ink handling, through weeks of hand-rolling my type for a flat-bed iron hand-press. This year I’ve learned to create simple but organised systems when working with children so that they can be as creative as possible and I don’t get lost along the way. Children are so mindblowingly full of creative energy that their educating adults have to spend most of their time working out ways to structure and contain that energy, whilst also trying to encourage it.

So: once we finished printing their names in letterpress, I spent time during the Book and Numlit weeks printing the backs of the postcards using photopolymer plate and my home press.

As you can see, we had two versions of the writing lines. The top is for Years 1 and 2, and the bottom version is for Kindy and Pre-school, as their writing is so much bigger. The rest is all the stuff that makes the funding go around, like logos and ownership [...]