mad-eye macco

Book Week 2014, a book week purists dream… no specific theme, just books, glorious books.

It’s probably fitting when your name is Macdonald you pick a character with Scottish heritage for book week.  The fact that character also has a disability was really just a happy co-incidence, the reality is… it was “all about the hair”.

Mac’s choice this year was the impressive auror Alastor “Mad Eye” Moody, from Harry Potter.  With perfect hair to pull of the look Mac was pretty impressed with himself.
Time constraints (and… oh, yeah, real life) meant we didn’t quite invent a recumbent wheelchair broomstick.  Fortunately, the freezing wind was of no concern by the appropriate choice of Dad’s Driza-bone oilskin jacket keeping Mac totally snug throughout the book week parade – he certainly fared better than some of the other muggles whose costumes would have been ruined by the addition of a jacket.

SOURCE: Harry Potter Page to Screen: The Complete Filmmaking Journey – by Bob McCabe – Harper Design – October 2011

Click this link to look back at book week’s past?

mac = albert

Book Week 2013 and the focus is on space.  I gave Mac a few options for his book week character based on things we already had ‘laying around’ the place.

To his credit he picked the more obscure option – but potentially easiest for me – in Albert Einstein.

He owns a cool Einstein tee-shirt courtesy of a recent trip to the Griffith Observatory, regularly gets around in some star pattern pants when not in his school uniform and he was pretty certain that had red converse hi-tops been around when Einstein was a kid… that’s what he would have worn.

Add some silver and white hair spray, a fake moustache and brows and, there you have it, Mac = Albert (yep, that is all Mac’s own hair).

I particularly loved watching the kids find out who Mac ‘came as’ then, share that with other kids as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, busily telling anyone who would listen “look, Mac came as Albert Einstein” or “did you see Mac? He’s Albert Einstein”.

I did buy Mac this book from the “I Am” series which we will read in the coming days on the Kindle App on the iPad.

I realised I had some of my own space/time continuum  failings as I tried to remember what Mac had done for book week each year since Kindergarten.  Thanks to some past blog posts & a Facebook post I was able to look back and see just what we actually did in those prior years.

CLICK THE ICONS TO CHECK OUT THE GHOSTS OF BOOK WEEKS PAST…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

book week, kurt fearnley and those “guns”…

Book Week 2012 is here.  School has once again gone with a theme… this year “Come as a Champion”.    While I admit,  my book week purist heart would like a straight ‘book character’ theme one of these years, it didn’t deter us from helping Mac find his perfect ‘champion character’.

In a nice stroke of serendipity the Paralympics are also on.  This has created much discussion at school about what event Mac might be able to compete in when he’s old enough.  The suggestion that maybe “sport isn’t his thing” hasn’t really been readily accepted… we’re still working on an acceptable answer. 😉

After throwing up a few options Mac settled on Kurt Fearnley.  For our non-Aussie readers – Kurt is one of THE legends of wheelchair racing and fits the ‘champion’ requirement perfectly.

In another twist the kids have been studying ‘simple machines’ in Science.  I offered Mac the opportunity of ‘bulking up his guns (arms)’ with a bit of “engineering” while sneakily providing some congruency to their recent learning… all in the guise of “dress ups”.  Mac was hooked… we were sorted.

NB: check your volume settings – there is some ‘muzak’ that hopefully won’t blow your ears out.

When it came to the crunch I probably should have sat in on a couple of their classes as my fading knowledge of fulcrums and pivots started making my head hurt.  Thankfully my Dad was a willing  assistant… although his full mechanical spring action metal arm system was soon discarded when I was able to prove my much simpler method would actually suffice.

Mac took the iPhone on stage and one of his classmates pressed the right button in Proloquo2Go for him so he could announce who he was (just as the other kids do).  It was nice to see the young kids at school get exposed to the idea of AAC and Mac’s method of speaking  (it was pretty cute that he got extra applause after he spoke – we really do have a great group of kids at our school).

Here’s some extra pics of the ‘wheelchair racer dude’ in all his glory.