Broom cupboard 4 - soon be time to think about heating this place

[TheHoneyBadger]

Will post this on the end of the other thread too but I have just found this:

If you are identified as a contact and asked to self-isolate by NHS Test and Trace, including by the NHS COVID-19 app you may be entitled to a payment of £500 from your local authority under the Test and Trace Support Payment scheme. If you are the parent or guardian of a child who has been told to self-isolate you may also be entitled to this payment.

^Presumably that is all of the 'thought' that has gone into the situation I've been talking about. Still doesn't tell us if we would be seen as taking unauthorised leave or able to work from home or anything - need union specific advice on that.

Fish

Oh
Wet pet

Interesting re in school jabs - sudden influx of consent forms means not all year groups were jabbed in this school (posted on Parents Utd):

The King's Breakfast is I think the proper name of one of those!

I recite off by heart to year 7 on National Poetry Day every year. They think I'm barking 🤣

Just thinking mother, that’s unreasonable on so many levels. Now till Mon would be hard enough to learn a poem, but having to source / select one as well? And it will send less confident children into agonies of anxiety. Have they been doing work about poems at school? Practised reciting?

Did they give any poem or source suggestions? How on earth is a less literate family supposed to even find a poem?

I learnt Jabberwocky off by heart just because, at about 9. Can still remember most of it:

‘‘Twas brillig and the slithey toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the momey wraths outgrabe.....”

( Way to discover nonsense poetry and autocorrect are not easy bedfellows!)

Thanks Dangling

purposely turning his PE clothes backwards and pretending to be backwards person

I'd laugh at this

@JanglyBeads I know. I said to DH maybe as she’s an NQT she’s a little naive in her planning for these kinds of tasks. They haven’t been doing any poetry. DD wasn’t even aware of the homework til I told her so it hadn’t even been spoken about in class - she’s left if for parents to explain. Now my DD is a co doesn’t child and will learn a poem and would be more than happy to perform it ... however, springing it on her isn’t very fair I don’t think and, as you’ve said, how would other children less confident respond? DS would point blank refuse to learn one. He doesn’t like being the centre of attention which is ironic as he often is as a by product of his quirky behaviour.

I feel like I’ve been ‘that parent’ with my emails though. Firstly, she sends DD home with a handwritten letter from another parent about their child instead of giving her a vaccination form. Secondly DD is sitting on a the ‘Bob’ table to manage their behaviour and now this.

*confident child

Now if I was a proper MN mum I would start a thread about all that 😆

Sticky on my fingers,

Sticky on my toes
Sticky in my pocket
And sticky up my nose

Sticky on my fingers
Sticky on my toes
Sticky in my pockets
And that's the way it goes.

Spike Milligan

Here is Betty

@MrsHamlet

Here is Betty

Ah that’s lovely.

Did your grandfather makes the edits?

Days by Philip Larkin, short and dark.

"What are days for?
Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats
Running over the fields."

I only really like dark poems. Two more favourites:

Spring
BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Good Bones
BY MAGGIE SMITH
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

I had a poem published at 12 that managed to end up being about death lol.

My fav is The Walrus and the Carpenter…. I LOVE that one!

He did :) He was a primary school teacher.

This is the one I always recite on poetry day

We Remember Your Childhood Well by Duffy is great if your parents are in denial about their shoddy parenting. And no swearing.

My child is coughing. She's 6 but we've done an LFT anyway - negative. I ordered a PCR just in case. She's not bad at doing it herself, but I figure that she didn't do a particularly good job. Sounds like the PCR results will be dodge too. Yay!

Does she know any song words well? Or any Julia Donaldson book? They are poems.

I could easily do Gruffalo or What the Ladybird Heard as a performance poem. Very Silly Dog by Nick Cope too.

Delurking to suggest The Adventures of Isabel by Ogden Nash. You wouldn't need to learn the lot, the rhythm and rhymes (like rancour/drank her) make it memorable, and it's very performable.

Isabel met an enormous bear.
Isabel, Isabel didn't care.
The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,
The bear's big mouth was cruel and cavernous.
The bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you,
How now, Isabel, now I'll eat you.
Isabel, Isabel didn't worry.
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She washed her hand and she straightened her hair up
Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.

She goes on to despatch a witch, a giant, a doctor and a bugaboo, which turns out to be the thing that hides under your bed in America.

I read it last year with a very quiet Y5 girl, just for fun rather than to learn it, and she not only learnt it off her own bat, but was brave enough to recite it to adults.

She washed her hands, not her hand!

I do like teaching poetry, just not shit ks2 poems which are never any good in my school.

Sometimes I sneak them into guided reading. They loved "Timothy Winters" last year, which is very sad and sadly relatable for lots of them.

Love love love poetry. And I didn’t know ANY of the above, they’ve made my evening!

I have a vague idea of writing more poetry some day.

That Larkin poem kicks you in the guts, doesn't it?