Improve Your Communication Skills
Alice Gives Advice – Written By You
Alice M is 10 years old, and has some great advice on being a girl
The Joy about being a girl is you get more opportunities because people mostly trust girls better than boys. I know that it majorly sexist but technically that is what happens in life.
We all know that girls have to go through a HARD time when they are older but it is sometimes worth it, GIRLS are the ones that actually produce the baby, GIRLS are the ones who have super fashion sense and are the ones who are unique with any kind of style Goth, jumpy, and get have any personality they want to and we wear make-up to make ourselves look nice, scary, horrible anything you want, we can style hair, have fun and mess around.
Some people don’t like being girls mostly because their scared, I am too, but if you think about it there generally is nothing to be afraid of. You have people all along the way to help you enter adulthood and become bigger and better, people will help you when it is hard and when you need constant monitoring but after all that has passed, I will guarantee that you will have had the time of your LIFE being a girl.
So what I am trying to say is: enjoy being a girl, enjoy having horrid things done to you (I know that sounds backwards but trust me, it I’ll be worth it) because when that is all over you’ll miss it.
Lots of Socks for World Down Syndrome Day
Do you sometimes wear non-matching socks? When you can’t find ones to match or just because you want to? Well on the 21st March you have the perfect excuse to and Agi is going to tell you why.
Agi has been making videos about her life with her little sister, who just happens to have Down Syndrome, for many years. We asked her to tell us more about this condition, and about life with Magdalena and to share some of her videos with us.
Firstly though who am I?
I’m called Agnieszka (Agi for short) and I am home educated with my little sister Magdalena, who is 7 years old. I have a website which I blog on about our life together and anything else I am interested in. I want to be a filmmaker when I’m older, and you can view lots of films that I’ve made on my website, and Magdalena wants to be an artist. She is one of my best friends. We have loads of fun together, and I don’t treat her any differently or treat her ‘specially’, even though she happens to have Down’s syndrome. Which is where the lots of socks come in…but first, let me explain.
I would never have known this unless my little sister, Magdalena was born with an extra 21st chromosome.
Have you worked out yet why World Down Syndrome day is on the 21st of March?
It’s because people with Down syndrome have three chromosomes on chromosome number 21, instead of the usual two. This is also known as Trisomy 21.
Why is it Called Down’s Syndrome?
So why call it Down’s syndrome? No, it’s not because people with Down’s syndrome are ‘down’ or grumpy, it’s actually because Dr John Langdon Down discovered the condition, and it was named after him.
Lot’s of people my age don’t know what Down’s syndrome is, (actually lots of adults don’t either) and that can make them scared of what they don’t know about, so they ignore Magdalena or talk ABOUT her instead of TO her or say something unkind thinking she won’t understand or be hurt by it. So before I get onto the socks, I want to tell you a bit about what Down’s Syndrome is and what it isn’t!
Stories from The Stables – #6 Falling Gracefully
Continuing the ever popular series Stories from The Stables, Carolyn Ward tells of falling (un)gracefully
What is the Big Deal About Finding Richard III?
As skeleton found under a car park in Leicester has been identified as that of King Richard III, who ruled England from 1483 to 1485. Richard has been pictured as a tyrant king. There’s a story that Richard killed his own nephews, the legendary ‘princes in the tower’ in order to usurp the throne.
Nearly a century after Richard’s death, Shakespeare describes Richard as a ‘bottled spider’, a hunchback. Since Shakespeare’s time writers and artists through history have imagined Richard as a terrifying figure, whose physical disabilities are signs of his cruel inner nature.
Some historians argue that Shakespeare must have been writing propaganda to please his queen, Elizabeth I, whose grandfather Henry VII defeated Richard in battle. These historians argue that Richard’s ‘hunchback’ is an insult made up by Shakespeare, but until now, we haven’t been able to know what the truth is.
Shooting stars, Weather, and Rocks falling from the Sky!
What do shooting stars, weather and rocks falling from the sky have in common? Are you wondering whether we have gone mad asking such a question? Do rocks ever fall from the sky? Of course they do! You might know them better as “meteorites”, and they are meteors, or rocks from outer space, that fall down to the earth. And what does that have to do with weather? It’s not like they come down like rain! And before you say to yourself “meteor shower”, remember that a meteor is actually a shooting star, a space-rock that burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Related, yes, but weather, no.
The weather connection is through another word, generally used to mean “study of the weather”. That word is “meteorology”. As you can see, all three have something in common – the word “meteor”.
So what is this word, and how did it come to mean these different things?
Meteor came into English through French in the late 15th century. In French it was meteore. Very similar, you might think. Does this mean that it is a French word. Not at all. The next question we must ask ourselves is where did French get it from? The answer is from Medieval Latin meteorum, which meant “things in the heavens”. But this is not the end of the tale. Latin took the word from ancient Greek, and in Greek we can analyse the word to see what it really means.
The Greek word μετέωρα (meteora) can be broken into two parts: meta, which means “over, beyond” and aora, which comes from the verb αείρω/ αίρω (aeiro, airo), which meant “to raise, lift up”. Even today, in Modern Greek, αιωρείται (aioreitai) means “it hovers”. All this means that the original meaning of the word was “thing that is raised in the air”. And even in ancient times this developed to mean “things in the sky” and gradually came to have the meaning it does today.
Another interesting point is that the word “air” is in fact from the same root as αείρω (aeiro), which makes it a distant cousin, or cognate, of “meteor”.
Did you know:
One of the largest and most famous meteor craters is to be found in northern Arizona, desert of the U.S. It is 1,200m wide, 170m deep and calculated to be created 50,000 years ago! It is more commonly known as the Barringer Crater.
Title Photography: Mike Lewinski 2013