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I googled Circle of Eights

Give pairs seven post-its and ask the children to write down the main scenes. Take feedback and allow children to adjust/add to their post-its. Pairs then work on listing the scenes and sticking them in order. They should disregard any scenes that are not crucial, and just keep the key events.

Agree with the class the basic key scenes. Demonstrate how to make a few notes about each scene to help with a retelling.

In pairs, children make notes about each scene to help with retelling the tale. These should be kept to the barebones. In pairs, practice retelling the story, taking it in turns. Then put pairs together to retell their versions to another pair.

If time allows, build this up to circles of eight.

End the session by hearing several retellings. Encourage the children to evaluate between tellings, refining and improving their version.

Explore ways of altering the retellings. Children decide to alter one aspect. They then retell the tale, with the alteration. Pairs should then move into fours
and retell their new versions.

Build up to circles of eight if time allows.

The children recommend a version they have heard that is really effective. Listen to these, and as a class evaluate what makes an effective retelling. This enables more in-depth evaluation, especially by the storytellers themselves.

Interesting development in the SM research: those who can’t afford the actual mushrooms can drink the urine of those who can and have done; SM’s have the unusual property of remaining unmetabolized by the body….or something…..

Mavis had not yet received any news from her friends Sharon and Gloria. She’d hoped she could have some postcard from them before she goes and join them…

Nearly two months… Two months since they had all received the exciting email from that Dr. Bronklehampton and had decided to take a leap of faith.
As a matter of fact, they had taken that leap of faith just before, and it was just a… “synchronistic confirmation that they were heading in the right direction”, that’s what old Harry had said… Or was it Joe? No, that was surely Harry.
Fred wasn’t very pleased.

Bored by all the variations of dominoes and dices games at their third-age club, the three inseparable ladies had decided, in a bout of delightful unreasonableness, to embrace all that modern technology had to offer. Sharon and Gloria, being the devil-may-care as they were, got their computer first. Mavis had to convince Fred that he could make his horse-racing bets with that computer without having to go to the city, now that the last pub in the village wasn’t taking bets any longer… and even play poker! she’d said, bluffing so vehemently that she’d almost blushed in shame for fear of being wrong. But that last argument had convinced old Fred. And now, she was connected too. A second-hand computer, with a dusty old keyboard, but she’d let it soak a night in a soapy basin, and it was now shiny as a brand-new one. Except that it now kept behaving strangely…

In their club, they could boast that now they were connected all over the word, and all the old parakeets of the club had almost choked over their tea when they had heard all of what they had discovered.
Sharon had won most of the glaring bedazzlement. Wearing newly bought sunglasses, she’d said whispering like a conspirator that she had searched her name on a website and she had seen more than 7 million pages talking of her! Imagine! More than seven million people talking of her! And she had not known she was so famous… Hence the sunglasses, she’d added with a wink… there were probably a slew of paparazzi hidden somewhere to discover all that was to know about her… But you can’t fool dear ol’ Sharon Stone.
Gloria Fowles had been gathering almost 4,000 pages… But well, she had not the charismatic aura of Shah.
And Mavis Staples had got a hefty 470,000 pages!… Of course, she had not told Fred, who was already so paranoid about all of this stuff. When they had received the machine, he was convinced there were miniature cameras and transponders from the MI6 inside the PC and had spent hours disassembling and reassembling it.

Very soon after they had registered for their free email address (the reseller had explained patiently that she couldn’t electrocute herself while licking the envelop), the next day to be precise, at 5:33 —that was the hour when Mavis had finished her routine dusting and breakfast preparing for Fred, and just before taking Gulp, the dog for a news reading (that was what Sha was saying “butt sniffing for dogs, is like news reading for us”), she had granted herself a little peek into the emailbox— she had seen something in the recipe folder.
She wasn’t sure why they had called that folder “meat” or “ham”… no that wasn’t “ham”… “SPAM” more like it… Anyway, in the recipes folder, she’d received her first email. She’d called eagerly Sha and Glo, and they had received it too, and had even answered it already, as they had spent the all night “surfing” as they said — which was a bit difficult for Sharon with her sunglasses in the dark.

All three of them had received a free coupon for a massage and therapeutic rejuvenating treatments (and possibly some bonus organ enlargements free of charge) in Tikfijikoo Island!

Well, now Mavis was ready to go too, now that Fred had been mollified and she’d gathered the money for the trip.
In a sense, that was good she’d not received anything yet from Sha and Glo, it would allow her to imagine the wildest things!

Before leaving the castle, the fake Viscountess needed to check something on the skull…
Was it a genuine one? She had almost trusted the so-called experts of the auction room, while she knew perfectly well that they only could see what they knew. And they didn’t know as much as her.

To her knowledge, there was only a handful of genuine old crystal skulls. But counterfeits were legions and a plague for such a skillful cat burglar as she was. Well, cat-burglar,… perhaps not as acrobatically as she used to… As a matter of fact, her life-long search for these skulls had suffered the competition of a little embonpoint… — the good thing being that those few sticky superfluous pounds had been perfect to impersonate the Viscountess.
In the past, she had come across a few of these fake skulls and most of them bore very similar indications leaving her to think stakes were high that they were coming from the same con-artist.

She methodically drew a little dagger from a scabbard at her belt. Going to one of the window, she drew one of the curtains a few inches to reveal the pale sun of Shropshire which was already fading.
Then, she turned the jeweled hilt in such a special manner that a soft clicking sound was heard, and a beam of light started to converge from the sun rays into the dagger. She directed the ray coming from the tip of the dagger’s blade into the bottom of the skull, and hold her breath in expectation.

Soon the skull started to glow a bluish light, and light poured out of the skull onto the walls in dancing symbols, while a soft buzzing sound was being heard around, started to drown her in a slightly dissociated state.
She cut the dagger’s beam very quickly, her heart pounding at the validation. It was a genuine skull. One of the six.

She had to hurry, she needed to proceed on her investigations to find the missing ones.

The trunk was there. She took another key that she had around her neck, leaving the first one on the cupboard’s lock for the Viscountess to be freed as soon as she would be out.
With the key, she proceeded to open the high-tech lock of the armored trunk which opened with a blow of air.

Her jumpsuit was here, along with the two turbo-reactor powered condor-wings that she strapped on her jumpsuit in very professional movements.

A few moments later, with her big dark sunglasses that gave her the appearance of an obese fly, Carla was flying high over the countryside of England, enjoying the soft gliding on the slightly damp air.

December 3 ^rd

^{( Hey, that’s 12.3, might be a hint for growth… Yurick)}

A communication about coordinate points, and how to travel between idea clusters

As the story starts to develop in a rapid and very intertwined manner, much like waves in the ocean, overlapping and rippling from and to many directions, Yurick became concerned that it may be difficult to keep track of, or rather to retain an ability to graciously navigate in it.

Let us imagine for a moment. Take your own life. It is composed of a multitude of moments. Your construct of linear time gives you the impression that there is a continuous succession or stream of moments.
In a manner of speaking, it is easier for you to grok the concept of multiple points of attention for your naturally associate them with your space. You can easily envision your many focuses happening all at once in a variety of places, towns or countries, and having a possibility to zoom in and out, so that to encompass more than your single current focus.
But what you do in engaging your conceptualization with your focuses would be equally valid were you to engage it in relation to that single focus that is you, in all of its moments of actualization.
But that would be far less familiar, as you identify quite strongly with that construct of time.

As that story unfolds, you discover that there are an infinity of points of attention dispersed in many many comments, and one comment can include many more than one point of attention itself. What you would be tempted to do, for it is something that is very automatic in your current associations, would be to attempt to draw lines between the points, to recreate a linearity, and thus facilitate your understanding of a certain action.

This is unnecessary and within your current movement of expansion of awareness would be counterproductive.

But you are familiar with that concept of coordinate points. For most of you, you once again associate them strongly with the space continuum, but they could be used in many many other situations. That story being one of them.
The coordinate points are in a manner of speaking, conglomerate of very coherent energy; they would not be “points” per se, but rather high concentration of these points of attention that your attempt to link together.
As such, they become the links that you are in search of, for in that drawing of energy points of similar expressions, they also become passageways between the associations that the points are linked to.
As a matter of fact, the “point” that you come to identify to the concentrated cluster of points would rather be a tone representative of that coherent energy that you can use to activate the links contained within that cluster of points.

That would be the reason why Yurick, in coming to understand that concept, has slightly adapted the original cloud of tags in the story, so that it can expand and be used to access the coordinate points that the tags are, quite simply.

Al was discussing with Sam on the phone.
He was reminded of the good advices Tina had told him to try before Hari Amgic: a treatment based on organic sulfur for his hair loss…
All he could get at the time was frizzy blond hair that would fall like red leaves in autumn…

But now all was for the best for his hair, he had maintained his hair at a manageable and sustainable growth rate, but somehow this seemed to have been sent back on his nails which were now growing alarmingly fast…

At least he had a perfect excuse since no shoe would be stretchable enough, to wander barefoot as he liked to do, though Tina was finding that a bit yucky.

This had been seen in the past apparently, as Al was searching in the World’s Archives…

Amazigh tea on the menu today, guys!
Eric, can we have a time travel party yurt icon?

:expand:a:paperclip:ll over:rec:news:ycle: :cluebox:the plac: :photo:calenda:games:r:e, th:sumari:at’s :penthingy:where!:vide:help:otape:

On Mount Elok’ram, the old abbot Hrih Chokyam Lin’potshee was gardening.

Despite his old age, and his being at the head of the Monastery, Hrih Chokyam was always doing his hour of gardening with great application and talent, as was asked to everyone, from the youngest to the oldest monks studying here.
The Monastery was a place of healing and teaching, dedicated to Margilonia, the Elder Goddess thought to have created the Earths. As a matter of fact, gardening was the simplest —yet most effective— way to fully appreciate the grandness and the interconnectedness of the whole of creation.

Hrih Chokyam remembered when he was a little child in the vast fertile plateaus in the Eastern part of Dam Adbor, bordering the high mountains. He had always loved the mountains, better than the plains, or the towns where the wars and plots were fomented endlessly. So he was wandering many times in the mountains, to collect herbs and also just for the fun and exhilaration of climbing higher and higher, and seeing the world as a small thing that could be placed into his hands.
His parents had wanted him to become a farmer, but some wealthy neighbours had thought he was showing signs of being able to do much better, and even proposed to have him pursue a career in the administration of Dam Adbor’s capital.
Young Hrih had considered the proposition for some time, and one day, went deep into the mountains to make his decision.
There he’d got this powerful connection with an enveloping warm manifestation of Margilonia, who prompted him to go higher than anyone had ever been on the top of the mountains, were a natural point of great potential magical energy was. Here, she had conveyed to him, he would have a monastery built, a perfectly clear channel for this yet untaped magical energy.

Ninety nine years ago that was.
Hrih had been higher than any human had ever been, in the search of this point, knowing he would feel it resonate with him. The mountains, he had learned were not as empty as humans had thought, and there were many other kinds of sentient beings living here, far from the wars below.
Interestingly, assisted by these magical sentient creatures and Margilonia’s energies, building the structure had been easy. He had never thought harnessing magic would be that easy, perhaps just because the traveling magicians coming at times in the village to do some healing or just funfair exhibitions were making that very difficult, and requiring lots of training.

The truth was, magic was everywhere, only people had become blind to it, or just lazy to use it. But old Hrih, even if his eyes were not as sharp as they used to be, could see it clear as day. Magic was in everything. Especially in one’s own very existence.
That was the first of the things people coming to learn in the monastery had to understand. Deceptively simple, yet the most difficult lesson for many of them. He had to admit, he had struggled quite a bit with it too, during the endless wandering into the vast mountains. But there had always been a root to eat, or some fresh mushrooms or eggs apparently left here just for him… He laughed now, thinking of it.

Hrih’s life had been so fulfilling. He knew he was weak now, and would not see the springing season, and he was thinking he had to choose someone to take care of the monastery. Few people went to stay here, for as they had learned and applied what was to learn, their own passion was coming back to them, and they would not need to stay any longer.

But a few days ago, a young one had come, announced to old Hrih by a singing rosy finch.
As usual, all was provided when things were ready for it.
Hrih had no doubt that the hesitant young man would be the next one to hold the title of Lin’potshee, or “Precious Elder”.

— The legend of Mævel — (Part III)

When the blue fox had disappeared, deep into the woods, Mævel was left wondering if all of that had only been a dream. Perhaps it was just a dream, and something that would make her parents raise their shoulders in dismay.
Especially since she had lost their gift carelessly they would say, the little pearl white ribbon…

She picked up the clothes that were left hanging to dry up in the wind, and came back to the little house.

Of course, her father Jorg noticed that she was not wearing the ribbon, but he was not much of a question asker, and things were or were not, and analyzing them was unnecessary for him. But of course, Ilga noticed it too, and she felt sad for poor Jorg who had endured so many sacrifices to buy the little ribbon that Mævel was no longer wearing. She wanted an explanation! Was it no longer to Mævel’s tastes, had Mævel lost it?

So Mævel, who could not lie to anybody, told them her encounter with Blohmrik, the cursed god in the woods, in the shape of a wounded blue fox… and at each of her words, was seeing their faces more and more disconcerted.
Their poor girl, who was already so different, had completely lost it,… ribbon and all that was left of common sense in her.

So they locked her up in the bedroom, that she was now occupying alone, as all of her brothers and sisters had left. Just to save her from herself, and see if that would help her gain some more solid sense of reality.

Mævel understood her parents, but she was deeply contrite that they could not understand what she had lived. Mævel was still doubting the reality of her meeting the blue fox, so she asked for some sign from the Gods before going to sleep, to see clearly.

That night, Mævel dreamt of a dark-haired young man with a white diadem¹ around his head, dressed in a cerulean blue tunic and wearing a sword. He was enshrouded in a warm light and as she took the hand he was extending, they were carried away by a springing scented wind into a meadow of multicoloured flowers, some of which she had not even known could exist. She had felt at home.
When she woke up, in the middle of the night, Mævel was transfixed by the beautiful soothing dream. She could not remember much more, but he had told her something. That there was deep magic in her, and it would help her find her true home, but that she would have to gain back her true name from the Elder God who had took it from her.

She quickly took her decision. She knew she had to search for the blue fox in the forest. But how could she escape the locked bedroom? She was starting to feel desperate again, but she remembered that there was some magic in her, and how she had felt it deeply true in her dream.
As she was focusing on the warm expanding feeling of her dream, an old rusty key materialized in her hand.

—

¹ diadem: [ ˈdī-ə-ˌdem (dəm) ] from Greek diadēma, from diadein to bind around; akin to Sanskrit dāman rope — was originally a white ribbon, ending in a knot and two strips that were placed often on the shoulders, that surrounded the head of the king to denote his authority.

The unusual overwhelming heat, which had begun with the spring equinox had finally temporarily receded with the appearance of big opaque cumulonimbus filling the sky with a mute thunderous sound. The flickering glow was no longer enough for Raphael to distinguish the small dark characters dancing before his eyes, the storm having let the night pounce on them earlier than it should have.
So, Raphael closed his thick leather-bound book and put it back into his burgundy backpack bag, inhaling deeply the air of the dusk, mollified by the music of the raindrops that ricocheted now discreetly on the rusty steel plates.

The remaining passengers began to hurry around a meager dinner wrapped in dirty newspaper sheets, displaying energy resources that he felt incapable of. Feeling no hunger at all, he decided to go on the pontoon to taste the moisture exuding in the evening, this celestial water, soothing down the fever of this trip, which drew to a close. The boat continued to rend imperturbably through the obsidian sea, and the thick enveloping fog prevented them to distinguish the lights of the city that he could feel at a distance.

This was not the first time, but at each of his return, the city seemed changed, this time ghostly apparition, once glittering pearl. This was undoubtedly one of the reasons which had him leave it, as others would have done with a lover, to better appreciate this fleeting moment of reunion.
The book had been given to him by a stranger he had met, and was part of his mission; he didn’t usually accept assignments in this city where he was too obvious, but the stranger had assured him nothing illegal would be required of him, just delivering a book.
He had leafed through the book, just to make sure there was no foul play on the part of this strange man with amber eyes that seemed to keep changing colours. But the book had seemed innocuous. Even worse, it did not make any sense for Raphael. The chapters were randomly numbered, and the text seemed to keep changing. Perhaps it was Raphael’s mind which played tricks on him, but it was baffling for him, as he was accustomed to keep his senses sharp as a dagger. Whatever,… The man had paid, and a plump pile of money even.

The insistent rumors of a mysterious illness which had already claimed fatalities within the walls of the city had not deterred him to go there —knowing that the few people caring about him would have preferred to see him flee this destination, so certain as they were to be themselves immune to the contingencies of life. Even the bald adipose captain of the ship, Fat Yong Choi had seemed wary of having a pale-skinned foreigner coming on board of his boat, but he had quickly seen that Raphael was no common traveler.

But there was no longer time to rehash those turpitudes, the harbour finally appearing, like a halo glow from the contours of which some faint sounds escaped, soon to be stifled by the purring and cracking of the bulging vessel.

The winds began to sweep the docks violently, causing the cargo, now anchored, to oscillate wildly, like a huge weeble at the hands of the elements. Fortunately, due to the alarming news from the city, the boat was only half full, and the unloading was smooth. Raphael, unnerved by the long journey, only wanted to walk, but patiently followed the slow pace of the procession which led him outside of the harbour’s enclosure, even before he had noticed it.

Raphael wanted above all to rest, but didn’t care to be bothered speaking to someone. He preferred to sink deep down in his thoughts while walking through the streets, rather than lose this feeling of freedom. Freedom to choose his own itinerary, without a word to say, entirely open to the silence of the streets.

The fine drizzle had indeed deserted the streets making the city infinitely enjoyable for him. It was indeed just as he liked it best, at dusk, just faintly resonating with the sound of his own steps.
Empty — a few passersby in search of a shelter nearby. He imagined to be a ghost haunting these places without life, enjoying the feeling of being the predator felinely prowling in this scene without spectators, shrouded in the reassuring complicity of the night.