Bonjour Paris!

I'm just back from the 2nd of my Easter trips: this time to Paris. 

It was a great trip, a real highlight of which was the David Hockney 25 exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The building itself is stunning, designed by Frank Gehry and looking like the billowing sails of a galleon from the front. It's in the Bois de Boulogne, which is a Metro ride out from the centre: a lovely area. Hockney was there himself the day before we visited, which was the actual opening day of the exhibition. Room after room of Hockney over four floors.

The building of the Fondation Louis Vuitton - some Snapseed treatment which has made the reflecting pool of water at the top of a cascade a different colour in an unexpected way.

Bigger Trees Near Warter or/ou Peinture Sur Le Motif Pour Le Nouvel Age Post-Photograpique 2007, measuring 12m by 4.5m. Largest of Hockney’s paintings and made up of 50 smaller canvasses of a landscape near the East Yorkshire village of Warter.


Here's a YouTube teaser of what's on offer. 

If you get the chance... go....

Images: top - Alan Parkinson, bottom - Sally Parkinson - shared on Flickr under CC license.

Paris 2024 - Olympics Activity

Year 8 students have a week on an adventure trip this week. 

A small group is not going along - many of them came along on the recent trip to Iceland that we ran instead.

I was asked to put together a geography activity for them, which would take three lessons to complete. I have connected it to the work we have been doing with Year 8 already this year, and drawn out a few themes:

- sustainability

- circular economy

- globalisation and the importance of global communities

- togetherness and conflict

Shared here in case it might be of interest. Discussion / research and then a presentation. 

Can be made longer if you prefer by providing more time and scaffolding. 

Not as much as there might be on other themes which you may feel are missing? - if so, put them in yourself.

Visit the page here.