Hello, friends and followers!
It’s been a crazy couple of months here at Teaching With Magic. No sooner did I finish my final Masters Thesis at Signum University when my son decided to come into the world a good three weeks early! Since then it’s been a whirlwind of diapers, nursery rhymes, and finding our footing in what we can only call our “new normal”.
As a result of this new normal, some projects have had to be placed on the back burner, but the good news is that some other successful projects have come to light in recent months. Regretfully, due to time constraints and limited child care, I’ve had to say goodbye to Outschool for the present. Hopefully, I’ll be able to host classes there in the future. If not, I’ll find a way to bring Magic to kiddos anyway!
I’m happy to say that I am continuing my work with Signum Academy Clubs (boy did I miss those kids while I was on maternity leave!), as well as taken on some Coordinating duties with the program. I’m very excited to continue expanding the program and getting more kids involved with their incredible clubs.
Speaking of incredible classes, I’ve also had a lot of fun teaching with Signum’s newest venture, SPACE (Signum Portals for Adult Continuing Education). In addition to my Book Clubs, I’ve also been co-teaching some classes with James Tauber of the Digital Tolkien Project. As we discussed in our presentation at last year’s Prancing Pony Podcast Moot, we work together to teach Tolkien’s content to children, and together we discuss the various aspects that make Tolkien exciting and have broken them down into various modules and classes. As I’ve been on maternity leave, there’s been little opportunity to teach our content to my younger audiences. However, we are “testing out” our ideas (and responding to requests for our content!) on our adult learners in our SPACE Modules (each module is 2x a week, 1 hour, and runs for 4 weeks). So far, we have run our “Tolkien’s Invented Languages” module twice, and successfully completed our “Bridge to the Silmarillion” course last month. This summer we will be launching our “Tolkien’s Writing Systems” and (hopefully) “Second Age of Middle Earth,” which we hope will get fans excited for the Amazon series “The Rings of Power”. I will also be separately running my Book Club Modules for Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.”
I’m beyond excited for these next stages in my work, and I’m excited to see where Teaching With Magic is going to take me next. I will, of course, be continuing with my Teacher Features, and I will be writing some more on some additional topics that I’ve been holding on to, such as podcasting and academia, adapting fantasy content for baby books (might as well use what I’ve got), book recommendations, and so much more.
Thanks for bearing with me as I got to know my little bean, and I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions for future content. What would you like to see at Teaching With Magic?
