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2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 16,000 views in 2012....
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On Saying Goodbye to Primary PGCE Students
For the last nine years at the end of the first week in July I have been saying goodbye to Primary PGCE trainee teachers as they complete their initial teacher education. It is a celebratory occasion,...
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Finding ‘And Yet the Books’
One year I decided that I would decorate one of my teaching rooms with my collection of Poems on the Underground posters that I had kept rolled up in a drawer for years. I had noticed that the gap...
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Lifesaving Poems: Shel Silverstein’s ‘Not Me’
I wrote yesterday about pitching poems in the classroom which are aimed not at the crowd but perhaps one child. I am not arguing for this as a blanket strategy. All teachers know you need to mix it...
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Scribbling With Delight
When I speak to trainee primary school teachers about their views of poetry I am often struck by their divergent experiences of it at school. One student said to me recently that she was completely...
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Lifesaving Poems: Riddle 7 (The Exeter Book)
Sometime in 1997 I went to hear Kevin Crossley-Holland give a reading at Exeter Central Library. I’d heard he was in town (there was no internet to speak of then) from my wife, whose school he was...
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The class of my dreams
The Class to the Class of 2014 after Raymond Carver The class with beautiful scarves The class who learned ukulele The class in love with their stationery The class sipping free coffee from Waitrose...
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Saying goodbye
It’s a funny feeling, almost new each time I experience it, an anticipation of loss that is somehow fresh and exciting, even though the loss that is about to follow is familiar and regular. I am...
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