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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Mike Ingham 1949 - 2009

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Mike died on 22 nd of February. For ten years between 1980 and 1990 I played with him in a band called The Moles , along with Derek Guy and Henry Holzer . It started out as a ceilidh band. We met on Friday evenings at Henry's house to rehearse and chat, and played gigs maybe once a month, but more frequently in the summertime.  In the early years I didn't have a car and Mike would pick me up every Friday in his Morris Traveller. Ellie and Emily always looked forward to his arrival and it usually took at least half an hour's conversation before we were ready to leave.  Mike was a terrific guitarist. He grew up listening to his dad playing all the standards on the guitar, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of those old songs. Sweet Lorraine was a favourite of his dad's. He was brilliant at working out the chords, too, and also at faking it when he wasn't too sure. We called that improvising until Mike came up with a better word - impoverishing!  Sitting on ...
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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....
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