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A Poem by Amber – Written by You
I’m Amber and I’m 14 years old. I love reading, writing, drawing and basically anything creative! When I’m older I want to be a freelance journalist – I think that would be quite fun! I like reading YA and my favourite authors are Suzanne Collins, J.K Rowling, Luisa Plaja and Cathy Cassidy.
My Teen and YA Book Review Blog The Mile Long Bookshelf The Mile Long Bookshelf Facebook page.
@MileLongBookS on Twitter.
Featured Image NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Stories From The Stables – Sam
This is first of a series of Stories From The Stables, by Carolyn Ward.
I fell off, honest
Learning to ride is a fabulous hobby. It can be pricey, but you can borrow a hat and crop from most stables, and start off in trousers and strong shoes. It is great exercise, very exciting, and teaches respect for animals, balance, and correct posture.
When I was very young I rode at Stourton Stables, a children’s riding school where the ponies were mostly grumpy and had to be separated in the fields for fear of kicking each other to pieces.
Oh, happy riding lesson days. Hours spent in icy pouring rain, in snow, in fog, and even more rarely; in lovely sunshine. The best riding times of year for me were spring and autumn, before and after the major insect season.
The Doncaster Book Awards – By Kids for Kids
There are lots of children’s book awards, but the Doncaster Book Awards is special. That’s because children decide not only which books they want to win, but even which ones are on the shortlist.
Doncaster is in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Lots of schools in the area, alongside many home-educated kids, register and take part in the awards. First, the children select the shortlist for different categories of books, and these are then voted on by all the schools and the children. Sometimes book publishers ask to get their books on the list, but the answer is always no. This one is by children, for children!
Egg Box Gardening
I started a little experiment of my own this spring. I wanted to find an easy way of sowing seeds for growing vegetables at home. I have a small veggie patch, but I worked out last year that I could grow a lot more, if only I had many more seedlings to plant out.
But sowing seeds can be a bit fiddly, and then you’ve got to plant out each tiny plant. That takes a lot of time. I wanted more veggies for less work, so I collected as many egg boxes as I could find, and sowed seeds into each egg holder. The pictures show the planting and growing on of broad beans, but I have also used the egg boxes for runner beans, radishes, beetroots, spinach, tomatoes, rocket, pak choi and patty pans.
And it’s not too late to start growing your own right now. You don’t even need a veggie patch in the garden; plant the egg boxes into a pot or container for your window sill or patio.
Early English – The Latin Alphabet
In our last post, we discovered the runic alphabet and the Futhorc, and now we are going to look at what came next. The Latin alphabet.
The Futhorc was gradually replaced by the Latin alphabet. However, it seems that the Latin alphabet was not perfectly suited to represent English, which contained sounds that did not exist in Latin, and so people adapted it with the addition of a few runes: thorn to represent ‘th’ and wynn to represent ‘w’, as well as a few adaptations in usage of the already existing Latin letters in order to make them better suited to representing English sounds.