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National Stationery Week 2016

Author Nicki CawoodPosted on

National-Stationery-Week-Sponsors-2016

 

We’re almost there!

You’ll have no doubt seen my FB, Instagram and Twitter pictures and posts relating to the week us stationery tarts refer to as National Stationery Week. A whole week dedicated to the love not only of stationery from top brands such as NU: notebooks, Staedtler, Maped, Bic, Helix and Sheaffer but how they are used.

The theme of this year’s NSW is Writing Matters which is something that instantly calls out to me. As a freelance copywriter by trade the written word is a something I find beautiful and powerful. As a Mum and a stationery fan seeing these words on paper, written with a pen or a pencil I love as opposed to on a screen makes them all the more magical.

We (I saw “we” as trusted family members have already pilfered some of the contents!) were very lucky to be sent a bundle of stationery from the lovelies at Small Man Media who are the ones creating all the buzz about NSW. I’ll be reviewing these in more detail next week however right now I want to talk more about why “Writing Matters”.

Writing matters for a vast number of reasons. For me it is about creating something personal, something in my own hand. It is about our children creating something, be it a picture with a few words of explanation or a fantastic story they’ve written us. Writing matters because it is central to learning, for children and us grown ups too as the potential, and the passion for learning never really leaves us. There are so many reasons why writing matters (organisation being one, I’d be lost without my paper-led organisational tools) and to read more about this have a look at this National Stationery Week A-Z  of why writing matters.

Throughout the week, as well as celebrating stationery as a whole and in general you have seven dedicated days of stationery to look forward to….

National-Station-Week-2016-7-Days-of-Stationery

In this fabulous digital age sometimes we forget the pure joy, as well as the usefulness of putting pen to paper and  a large part of NSW 2016 is about remembering why we love stationery so much.

That said… if you want to keep abreast (online) of all that is going on during National Stationery Week 2016 visit the NSW website and join the conversation via Twitter and on Facebook. To be fair, if you’re as mad about stationery as I am, the chances are you’ll be seeing posts about it popping up everywhere…. enjoy!

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Keep up with what’s happening across social media with these hashtags.

 

Why does writing matter to you?

 

In Geeky Stuff, Reading, The Boys

Coding and Our Children

Author Nicki CawoodPosted on

Coding

The only languages we were taught at school when I was growing up were French and German and if I’m being honest I only really remember hello, goodbye, how many brothers and sisters I have and all the swearwords.

My children however have a whole new world opened up to them and believe it or they are learning the language of the internet, they are learning to code! My eldest son is nine years old and has been using Scratch at school for a couple of years now as part of the school curriculum. He also attends Code Club at the local library once a fortnight where he continues to code (Python soon) and on top of this has started using Command Blocks to “code” in Minecraft.

All of these coding languages, all of these opportunities; we as parents think the fact that all of this is available to him is fantastic. It doesn’t hurt that we are all a bit geeky (in a good way) and enjoy this sort of thing.

Recently Kieran has been asking questions about secondary school (he has 18 months or so of primary school left!). After search the local “big” school for answers to certain questions we came across a news article about the schools coding club, Raspberry Pi. Some code they wrote as part of a competition was selected as a winner and sent up to the International Space Station, the team involved visited Tim Peake himself at a special event in his honour and had the good fortune to meet Professor Brian Cox and Dara O’Briain. To say that he thought this was cool is a huge understatement.

The point I’m trying to make is that our children have this fabulous opportunity to learn to code and if they wish literally go on and shape the internet, our digital devices, how things work and more. That is pretty amazing stuff.

Roy and I are very much behind this aspect of their learn and are keen to support it and help them go as far as they want and as far as they can. Personally I’ll have to do some reading up on coding as I still struggle with HTML but between us, the school, code club and all of the other resources available to them I see a very bright future for the boys and I can help but be excited by that.

Do your children enjoy coding? What do they do (Scratch, Python, Raspberry Pi?). Who knows, maybe some of this knowledge will rub off and this not-so code savvy Mum will be able to manage some basic programming at some point?

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