Join us this Thursday 14th May on Instagram Live at 5pm for a Q&A session with school specialist Ruth Pierce on Supporting Dyslexic Learners at Home and Beyond.
Read moreDyslexic Learners at Home, Part 5: Multi-sensory teaching at home
For the next part in our series to support dyslexic learners at home, we look at the importance of multi-sensory teaching and signpost some resources from Dr Susie Nyman on using it at home.
Read morePoem Of The Week, Week 4: Lockdown by Audrey Ardern-Jones
For our last poem of this week’s Poem Of The Week, we have Lockdown by Audrey Ardern-Jones. This relatable sonnet reflects on the solemn and hopeful moments of lockdown-
Lockdown
It’s Easter week, Holy week, another week
of quiet, no aeroplanes overhead, an empty sky
waiting; days slipping into days in this unique
regime of silent streets where no-one passes by.
We listen to radios, stroll most mornings;
the dead are counted daily, numbers spin like dice across
the globe - a pandemic in crisis - messages spread
in seconds: words that pool in times of loss.
In our garden a blackbird sings, his yellow beak
opens wide like a chorister, he loves this calm;
a robin chirps in harmony, multiple magpies shriek
in voices, hey, hey, hey, loud as a burglar alarm.
The world’s on hold, our planet heals, cools down,
we long to dance again - live life in a fancy gown.
Poem of the Week, Week 4: I Slip into My Mother's Shoes by Jo Roach
Another poem of Poem Of The Week is I Slip Into My Mother’s Shoes by Jo Roach. With VE day approaching and the language used to describe lockdown in the media, this poem rouses a relatable mood -
I Slip into My Mother’s Shoes
and stand at the bench in the munitions factory
oil pours over my hands
the air thick with the choking smell of sulphur
my skin stained canary yellow
the deafening din of the machines
the clatter of metal trolleys
I run into the Anderson shelter
terrified by twelve seconds silence of doodlebugs
have all my teeth removed at the Angel Dentist’s
ready for an ill-fitting set of false teeth
take dictation in Pitman’s shorthand
type sixty words a minute in an office in Charterhouse Square
catch a Green Line bus for a day out
lift my skirt and go for a paddle by Southend Pier
dance down Oxford Street on VE Day
with men in coarse demob suits
I’m wearing an engagement ring
a ruby with diamond chips
I wait in the church and he doesn’t come
I go back to my baby son and one room.
Jo Roach born and brought up and still lives in the part of London where she can trace her mother’s family roots back to 1650. Jo’s father was from Ireland, a connection to place which exerts a strong influence on her poetry.
Poem Of The Week, Week 4: 'Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini' by John Mackinnon
For week four of Poems Of The Week we bring you John Mackinnon and his poem, Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini. Whilst the galleries and museums are closed to the public, perhaps this poem will conjure the imagery of the Italian Masters…
Three Paintings by Giovanni Bellini
Madonna
If we are to be judged
it won’t be the bambino
sucking his finger and staring
vaguely heavenwards,
but the unlettered girl watching us,
not smiling, not unkind,
whose charged stance is the question
we won’t evade.
Circumcision
She urgently holds
her child to the knife.
His body shudders
as he takes on the law.
The old priest,
so careful in the act,
is all beard,
eyelid, eyebrow.
Jerome
He is reading a book
in a rock landscape
a face disfigures.
It frames the lit city
and the hills’ recession.
While the lion waits
he will lift God’s word
on the state’s stretched tongue.
Mackinnon states, …”recently I have been writing a series of short poems on paintings; the poems here relate to the National Gallery’s 2019 exhibition of Bellini and Mantegna and their permanent collection. I see a poem as an exploration of a territory opened up by some kind of form or material.” Mackinnon website is www.johnmackinnon.org.uk.