Written By You

A Ghost Story – Written By You

Hi my name is Alice. I am 11 years old and I live in Nottingham.

Drama is my favourite subject and I am good at it. I love letting my creativeness flow and I do that by writing horror stories.

When I grow up I want to be a marine biologist. But I have a substitute job which is being an author!!

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Science, Nature and Tech

Why do we get Hiccups?

why do we get hiccups

Everybody gets hiccups (also sometimes spelt ‘hiccoughs’). Even when babies are still in the womb they hiccup, which can feel very odd to their mother! But why do we get them and how can you stop them?

What are Hiccups?

Hiccups are caused by the diaphragm (pronounced DYE-uh-fram). This is a large, dome-shaped muscle that sits at the bottom of your chest cavity, below your lungs. When we breathe in the diaphragm tightens, helping to pull air into the lungs, and when it relaxes it forces the air back out again. Sometimes the diaphragm becomes irritated and instead of tightening smoothly it does it in a jerky way, which makes air suddenly rush into your throat. This air is stopped when it hits the voice box and makes the opening between the vocal cords close very suddenly. This is what produces the sound of the hiccup.

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Travel

Being an Expat – The Best of Both Worlds

Being an expat is not the easiest thing in the world, but it’s certainly is one of the most interesting and enriching experiences one can have. Alexia moved from Athens to London in September 2012, and is still trying to figure out expat life, armed with optimism, patience and lots of enthusiasm. She explains how she finds life… here and there.

 

Here: I meet new people all the time and develop great friendships with people from all over the world. I’m more open socially than I was back home.

There: Although I miss them terribly, I’m so happy every time I go back home and see my old good friends and my family. Every reunion is filled with lots of hugs and happiness.

 

London’s landmark, Big Ben

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Art & History

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.

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