Jump! Mag

Language & Literature

Talking in Text

Text speak is very confusing for a lot of people, but it is one area in which children and teenagers are far more advanced than adults. Mobile phones and the internet are recent inventions.

Imagine what it was like for your parents as children. If your parents are 30 years old, the internet did not exist for them! Mobile phones were only invented in 1973 but did not become common for 15 or 20 years. The first ones cost thousands of pounds and were the size of house bricks!

News & Politics, Popular

How to Jump into Politics

Are you interested in politics? Are you not sure?

Recently, we posted an interview with MP Hilary Alexander. where she talked about how she was inspired to get involved in politics and do positive things for people. She also said that if we don’t like the way things are, we have the power to change them. Sometimes, though, as a younger person, it can be a little bit hard to know where to start – especially if you’re under 16 and can’t vote yet. Here are a few things to think about if you want to ‘be the change you want to see’!

Art & History

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.

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.

Written By You

Living On a Boat – Written By You

Have you ever seen barges on the river, and wondered what it would be like to live on one? Is it really cramped and damp, and do you have to move around and go to a different school every week? We spoke to 11 year old Annabelle to find out what it’s really like to live on a boat.

Science, Nature and Tech

A Day in the Life of… a Structural Engineer

You might be starting to think about which subjects you want to study at school, perhaps you have even had a talk about careers.

One thing that is quite tricky to assess is what a job is REALLY like. Some jobs are quite easy to imagine, such as working as a teacher, because we see the work that teachers do every day. Some jobs are a bit of a mystery. What does an engineer actually DO? And what do you have to study, to become one?

Today we are introducing a new series of articles, which will show you the typical working life of people in many different professions. If you know someone who has an interesting or unusual career, ask them if they would agree to a short interview with us to show kids a day in their life.

We were lucky enough to interview Tasha Scott, who was happy to explain to us her studies and career as a Structural Engineer.