LETS Swap!
Pokemon cards, Moshi monsters, jelly stickers, friendship bracelets – at some point over the last few years my kids have swapped all these things. And in return they get good stuff back.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could go into a shop and, even if you had no money, you could still swap something you had for something you want?
In communities all over the world, people are doing just that. Or something very like it.
Local Exchange Trading Schemes or LETS for short, enable people who live near each other to swap their skills and receive goods and services without having to pay a penny.
When Two Girls Sent Their Cat into Space
Have you ever let go of a helium-filled balloon and let it soar into the sky? Maybe you’ve even tied a message onto the string, with your contact details and hoped that someone would let you know where it landed when it popped. These awesome girls went a big step further than that. They sent a balloon into SPACE, with a couple of Go-Pro cameras attached, in a really cool science experiment.
Women You Should Know – Conductor Alice Farnham
The musician and conductor Alice Farnham spoke to us about being a conductor, and the new courses for young women that she is giving at Morley College in Great Britain.
The courses are designed to get more girls and women interested in conducting.
My Multilingual Life – Written By You
‘Do you speak English?’
For British and American girls who travel to a different country, that question is often the first sentence we learn.
‘Sprechen Sie Englisch’
‘Parlez-vous Anglais’
‘habla usted Inglés’
‘Вы говорите по-английски’
‘您说英语吗’
What is it like for the estimated two thirds of the world’s population who speak at least two languages? The people who we refer to as ‘bilingual’, if they speak two languages, and sometimes as ‘multilingual’, if they speak more than two languages.
The researcher and writer David Crystal estimates that of the approximately 570 million people in the world who speak English, over 41% are bilingual in English and some other language.
Today’s contributor knows all about speaking more than one language.