The start of Wimbledon, the throne of tennis.

 Try a few online games of tennis here, here and here

 Or get some good coaching videos for young players HERE

For tea love?

“You’ve got to get to the stage in life when going for it is more important than winning or losing”

Arthur Ashe

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I often encourage children not to worry about their spellings. I explain that that doesn’t mean “Argh! Don’t worry about your spellings e.g. DOG with a spelling of G. Q. W. H. U.G. 32 Zs and a K.

Instead it means “Don’t WORRY about your spellings”, in other words don’t allow a fear of making mistakes stop you from getting a classic idea, or piece of literature, down on to paper.

On that note, I found this remarkable poem recently, by “Author Unknown” It really does illustrate how ridiculous English spellings are.

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I!  Oh hear my prayer.
 
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
 
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
 
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
 
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does.  Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
 

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
 
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
 
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
 
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
 
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
          
Pronunciation
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
 
Finally, which rhymes with enough
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Try Dr. Grammar or Spellodrome (the spelling version of Mathletics)

Here is a set of memory aids to help you with 100 of the most often mispelled misspelled words in English.

There are, of course, many differences between English and American spellings!

Try Compact Oxford English Dictionary for Students including their top 10 spelling tips.

There are also the great How to Spell Ridiculous, How to Spell Separate, and d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com

Have phunn!

A super day at East Barnet School north of London, working with staff and pupils from the ICT and English departments on developing visual literacy.

I taught a lesson with some Year 7 students who really rose to the challenges of creativity.

We looked at ways of recording and publishing the results of creativity.

Take a peek at these tutorials, on using Audacity, on the Radio Anywhere site. These are helpful hints to help get closer to a “pro” sound.

Even the pros find some difficulties, as this article from the Guardian shows, though, sometimes a few glitches can add to the charm of a recording.

Or, in the words of Albert (yes, Albert) Hitchcock:

I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the manmade sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.

One of my favourite music quotes, alongside:

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.
-Sir Thomas Beecham

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.
-Elvis Presley

I love Beethoven, especially the poems.
-Ringo Starr

The trouble with real life is that there’s no danger music.
-Jim Carrey

…and the understated,

There’s nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
-Johann Sebastian Bach

On the subject of quotes, being in a secondary school today, we touched on links with literature, including the works of Shakespeare. How about this gorgeous anagram:

To be or not to be: that is the question,
whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune. =

In one of the Bard’s best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent
hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten.

Thanks to Suzanne for the nudge towards the art of James C Christiansen.

Thanks to Hugh Seckleman, Janet Christou, their colleagues and pupils at East Barnet School, for a great day.

A bright and sunny day at Ashbeach School, Ramsey St Mary’s Cambridgeshire. And what a beautiful environment!

The last time I came up to work with the ASCA partnership, Ashbeach school were just about to get down to constructing their own classroom space out of straw bales! The school grounds are remarkable all round. Areas for peace and tranquility. Mini market gardens contain veg and flowers. A huge range of sculptures, all of them designed and built by the children, with help from the school’s artist in residence, David Swinton.

The straw bale “Hobbit House,” was the idea of headteacher Hazel Lambert. She was looking for an eco-friendly building to replace their garden shed, and it has turned in to an “outdoor classroom” which has its own wind turbine for generating energy. And the children had a hand in building it.

Ms Lambert said: “We are lucky enough to have an area of grassland and woodland attached to the school.

“We have an outdoor story area there and vegetable plots, looked after by each class. They sell their produce to buy the seeds for next year’s crops.”

With recycling in mind, the school were given a supply of old rubber tyres. The children filled these with a sand and hardcore mix (hoggin), to provide a base for the straw bales.

The tyres will act as an effective damp-proof membrane. The straw bale walls were rendered with lime to make them weatherproof.

The project took a remarkably short two weeks with help from, among others, Strawbale Buildings, based in Hereford. The unusual roof, which gives the structure its “hobbit-like” appearance, was designed by David Swinton too.

Parents and friends of the school helped with labour and other materials.

Ms Lambert said: “Local people were fantastic.

“They really rallied round and we are thrilled. The children were out there getting involved and they loved it.”

Hazel also valued the help of nine-year-old pupil David on his dad Charlie’s mini-digger.

Today, we were joined by staff from other schools in the area. The ASCA partnership schools include Ashbeach Primary, Upwood Primary, Ramsey Junior, Ramsey Spinning Infants, Bury CE Primary, Warboys Primary, Earith Primary, Somersham Primary and St Helen’s, Bluntisham. 

The children were a really bright and lively group who were a credit to the staff at Ashbeach. They responded with great humour and imagination. The staff at the school have already risen to the challenges of Myst and visual literacy after the keynote I delivered at the conference last year. Superb stuff

Thank you to Hazel Lambert, her colleagues and the children of Ashbeach for a very enjoyable visit.

During a break time, I was chatting with a few colleagues about websites with large amounts of text, and how you direct other folk to what it is you want them to read.

There are quite a few add-ons that let you highlight text on a web page.

However, have you ever sent someone a URL link to a page you want them to read, and then realised that they not have been able to pick out exactly what you wanted them to read amongst the pages of text?!

Awesome Highlighter solves that I feel.

The Awesome Highlighter is a great tool for anyone who wants to point out specific text on a website that they’ve shared with a friend or colleague. There’s nothing to install and you don’t even need to register in order to use it. You simply enter in the URL for the site you want to share, highlight the text you want noted, and save it.

You’ll receive a shortened URL that you can send off to your someone else. If you do sign up for a free account, you’ll be able to keep track of your highlights and return to them later if you need to make changes. You can also post your highlighted page directly to Twitter.

It also offers a large amount of opportunities to discuss and model the concepts of selecting appropriate and relevant information when researching a subject.

The simplicity of The Awesome Highlighter is … a highlight!

A few times recently at conferences or on training days I have referred to ways of making an internet search more accurate and on target. A few of you have asked for some more guidance with this.

1. Banish tension by using extensions.

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One of the best ways to search for a file is to add the file extension, or file type, you are looking for.

(All file extensions are preceded by a dot (or full stop) and tell the computer which program or programs are to be used to open that kind of file.)

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This can be useful when looking up movie files, images, sounds, and many other document formats.

For example, if you are doing your science planning and are about to spend hours making a PowerPoint presentation about the parts of a plant, save your time.

Try a search for “parts of a plant” and you will come up with hundreds of results.

However, now add “.ppt” (one of the file extensions for PowerPoint) and you will find many, and, some of them, very good presentations about plants and their anatomy. (You could also use “.pps”)

Below are just some of the main “file extension” labels you might find useful in narrowing down a search.

If you are looking for an audio clip, try the name you want (e.g. dog barking, or the name of a TV theme) and one of the following extensions (remembering to put a “dot” before the group of letters)
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Films and movie clips might be followed by one of these extensions:

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Pictures or graphics:
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Word documents:

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Flash files e.g. whiteboard activities:

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There are many other file extensions, but these might get you going to begin with.

Happy hunting!

Do let me know of any obvious (or less obvious) ones I’ve missed.

Thanks Geoff for the reminder of .pdf for… well… pdfs.

At the recent Able Gifted and Talented Conference in Derby, I met some pupils from Chellaston Junior School who did a super presentation about the philosophy they had been doing back at school.

I asked them a few questions and here are their really excellent and thoughtful answers:

“Four members of our class attended the conference and spoke about the work we’ve been doing on     P4C. Tim asked the following questions and after much discussion, this is what we thought:

What if mountains were dogs?

The earth would shake violently.
They wouldn’t fit in your house.
It would be really hard to walk the dog.
I’d hate to see the mess they leave behind.
There would be enormous fleas.
They’d crush your house.
You’d have to buy a massive kennel.
People would die if they stamped on them.
They’d scare the cats away.
Mountain climbers wouldn’t know whether they were climbing a mountain or a dog.
Use the dog’s tail as a slide.
It would drag you along on walks.
They’d smash and ruin towns and cities.

How does P4C help us in our other lessons?

It helps us to think of strange things for a story.
It helps our imagination to run wild when we’re drawing.
It helps us to think of better questions.
It allows us to think about what it’s like for other people, not just ourselves.
It makes us think about what would be the right thing to do.
It has shown us the importance of thinking”.

Well done all!

As Confucius said: If your plan is for one year, plant rice; If your plan is for ten years, plant trees; If your plan is for one hundred years, educate the children.

After the Hertfordshire ICT conference, I had an e-mail from Geoff Bannister, of Hobbs Hill Wood Primary School, saying “The doorways of doom was a great concept. I’ve spent the last couple of days creating my own ‘Doorways’ type-thing for my school website.”

Dare you take the challenge HERE?

Geoff has also taken up the idea of an interactive tour of the school and made his own virtual tour of Hobbs Hill Wood Primary.

Geoff wrote: “Taking the idea from the graphic adventures of old, I created a virtual tour of my entire school. Imagine the magestic vistas seen in Myst, but instead of being set in a weird “alien” world, it’s set in a primary school in Hemel Hempstead.

There’s no problem solving, or any cleverly incorporated videos of characters, but surely it’s just as awesome! Or maybe not.(It’s a shed load of linked pages not dissimilar to your doors of doom.)”

Well done and thanks Geoff! You definitely deserved the Lego Darth Vader we managed to find for you!