Five January Days





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A Tin of Words

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The tin of words is a symbol of the innate conservatism of the infant teacher.  When I was training as a teacher I studied plenty of different methods of teaching reading, but no one told me that I would need to start collecting two-ounce tobacco tins.   I'm not suggesting that the 'inventor' of the Look and Say method, the late Fred Schonell , specified an old tobacco tin for the transportation of words to and from home, but when I started teaching they were to be found in most infant classrooms.  Children in the real world learnt to read using a reading scheme and a tin of words. The system worked like this:  using a graded scheme like Sheila McCullough's ' 1, 2, 3 and Away' featuring Roger Red-hat, Jennifer Yellow-hat et al teachers simply gave the children the new words from the next book to learn as flash cards at home.  Next day, all being well, the child returned to school, read the book to the teacher, and took the new one away with a few more word
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Norman McCaig

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I've been meaning to write about Norman MacCaig for a while, and as the BBC is having a poetry season this seems like a good moment. MacCaig is second from the left on the book cover. Worlds was edited by Geoffrey Summerfield who also produced the excellent Voices series, of which more in another post. The book contains interviews with seven poets: Charles Causley, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Norman MacCaig, Adrian Mitchell and Edwin Morgan. It also has photo essays on each poet by Fay Godwin, Larry Herman and Peter Abramowitsch. I first came across Norman MacCaig in the late 1980s when I heard him being interviewed on the radio. He also read some poems about frogs. I went out and bought his Collected Poems and read it from beginning to end - not a thing I usually do with poetry books. For the last twenty years I've had a poem of his pinned to my wall: Between mountain and sea  Honey and salt - land smell and sea smell,  as in the long ago, as in forever.  The
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Walter de la Mare 's Collected Stories for Children

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  In 1947 the Carnegie Medal was awarded to Walter de la Mare for his Collected Stories for Children. This marked the start of the second decade of the Carnegie and was the first winning book since 1940 to have nothing to do with the Second World War. It has nothing to do with the war because all the stories were written during the 1920s and 1930s and this is another of those awards which were made, not for the book itself, but in recognition of the author’s contribution to children’s literature. Walter de la Mare c.1924   However, even had Walter de la Mare composed all of these stories in wartime it is doubtful whether the war would have had any influence on their content. Current affairs do not find their way into de la Mare’s work. What interests him is the boundary between this world and the various alternate realities of his imagination. Or, to put it another way, de la Mare believes there is something more than this material world; something just glimpsed on the edges of our per
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