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.
The Doncaster Book Awards – By Kids for Kids
There are lots of children’s book awards, but the Doncaster Book Awards is special. That’s because children decide not only which books they want to win, but even which ones are on the shortlist.
Doncaster is in Yorkshire, in the north of England. Lots of schools in the area, alongside many home-educated kids, register and take part in the awards. First, the children select the shortlist for different categories of books, and these are then voted on by all the schools and the children. Sometimes book publishers ask to get their books on the list, but the answer is always no. This one is by children, for children!
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.
Explaining History – And Firing a Steam Train
