Written By You

Connection Infection – Poetry by Kids

poetry by kids

News scrolling on a bright screen

Eyes scanning down a magazine

Locked up in a daydream

Obsessed by the latest Instagram post I’ve seen

I’m infected with a virus

That I can’t get out of my head

It’s got me going crazy

At least; that’s what the comments said

Hairstyles and creations

‘Urgent’ messages from relations

The latest trends and how to cook

Living life by an electronic book

I’m infected with a bug

That’s connected to my hands

That’s left me solitary

Unware of and blind to the past

We used to talk face to face

Of politics, clothes and space

But then you were replaced

By a cruel-minded interface

My alarm’s a notification

I’m dictated by cold metal parts

My day scheduled on reaching the leader boards

The social media bug has infected my heart

 

 

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Written By You

Cat’s Bats

Cat is 10 years old and has recently moved back from living abroad. She is settling into school in UK and learning to read and write in English (until now she was schooled in French, so it is a bit of a change). Her favourite animals are bats, and here she tells us a bit about them.

 

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Art & History, Language & Literature

What is a Malapropism?

You may not have had the term ‘malapropism’, but I am sure you know what a malapropism is when you hear it!  It is when you get one word mixed up for another and as a result change the meaning of a sentence completely.  

For example you might mean to say to your friend, “I’m bored, let’s go watch telly”, but what you actually say is, “I’m bored, let’s go eat telly”. 🙂 

What is a malapropism, and why does it have such a funny name?

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Art & History

How To Look At Art

how to look at art

Have you got a favourite painting? Mine is ‘A Portrait of the Countess Golovine’ painted by Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, sometime around 1797. It is, unsurprisingly, a portrait of Countess Varvara Nikolaevna Golovine, a talented musician and artist from Russia. Elisabeth and the Countess became great friends and I love the way the Countess is smiling in the portrait, with a red shawl draped around her shoulders and her dark curly hair swept up in behind a scarf. The painting belongs to the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, which is one of my favourite galleries.
Elisabeth-Vigee-Lebrun-Portrait-of-Countess-Golovine-Oil-Painting
I love going to art galleries and looking at paintings, but at first I found it quite a daunting thing to do. Have you ever been to an art gallery and not known where to start? Or heard art critics talking about symbolism, composition and form but not understood? Sometimes looking at art can sound difficult, and talking about it can be a whole other language!
But looking at art doesn’t have to be complicated. Things like symbolism, where objects in paintings are used to represent something that’s happening, like a skull symbolising death, can be important and the composition, or the way things in the painting are arranged, can tell us a lot about the artist and why the painted what they did.

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