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Today we were visited by Mary Kippenberger and Peter Charlton-Jones who spend their time travelling the globe telling stories, singing songs, debating, and presenting drama and music workshops. Together they are "Rhubarb"! At our school they sang and told stories that involved lots of the children, (and some startled adults), dressing up and acting out the parts. The children and adults present were spell bound and there were some fantastic performances from our new school actors. Rhubarb are Duffy "Role Models" visiting school assemblies around the country. It was a fantastic assembly and thoroughly enjoyed by everyone. Thank you 'Rhubarb' and thank you Duffy. Gareth Parr from Agility Logistics (our Duffy sponsor) was also present at the assembly and helped 'Rhubarb' present some of the Duffy books. Gareth was also pulled into the stories and dressed up beautifully as a bad wolf. A huge thank you to Gareth and Agility Logistics for their generous sp...

On Friday, a few of the Green Team members planted some lettuce plants out the front of the Room 5 classrooms. Also planted out were coreopsis plants which will give a nice patch of yellow flowers later in the summer. The children added compost to the soil and watered everything in. "Now the room 5 children can just reach out from their classroom to have salad in their lunch" said Michael.

Thank you to the children in Rooms 2,3,4, 7 and Conductive Education for their wonderful entries into Hornby Mitre 10’s recent competition. First place went to Lady Gaga from Chisnilwood Intermediate. Second place was Betty and Bert from Burwood. Although none of our amazing entries earned a placing, Hornby Mitre 10 have donated a wonderful pile of gardening gear to our school. A big thank you to Mitre 10, and well done to all those involved in putting our lovely scarecrows together, and taking the time to vote. Our entries looked fantastic!!!

  Pointless repetition, or exciting new entries in fan-favourite franchises? Pointless repetition: It's the enemy of sanity, good taste and common sense. Forget about grammar and linguistics and all the clever stuff we've crammed into our heads over the years - a lot of that stuff is damaging to the end-reader's health anyway, especially when applied directly to paper - pointless repetition goes beyond all of that into the realms of just, well, pointlessness... Most often, it's an idea or a bit of phrasing that's repeated pointlessly within the same paragraph. Sometimes though, like today, the repetition takes the form of a kind of I-can't-decide-which-so-I'll-use-both mashup. Think of today's villain like this: such as is equatable with i.e. and for example is equatable with e.g. So would you ever write i.e. e.g. together? No. So why put such as, for example, la la la ? The problem is, that at first glance it might sound okay. You can rationalise it ...

Welcome back, Scooby Gang, and welcome in, if this is your first visit. Following yesterday’s look at the first half of the BBC’s reader-solicited list of Americanisms , let’s continue our item-by-item analysis of British psyche and American lingo... (apologies if the list is all bunched-up without spaces between the items (like in Part One); I do space them out but Blogger seems to eat the spaces). 26. This is an old one too, and the OED calls it a “North American term for burgle”. Burgle being the standard British English. 27. Yes, I have to say, of all the things on this list, this is probably the one I dislike most. If wanting to drive a silver knife through the heart of the person that first popularised it can be attributed to ‘dislike’. 28. Eh, it’s a fun one. I think (don’t quote me on this though), that it’s an Anglicisation of a European – maybe French? – word. Like ‘croissandwhich’ or something. Any thoughts on this, people? 29. I think the problem here, Ami, is that for...

Our eagle-eyed man in the field, Inspector Q, sent in this hot tip . It’s a list of 50 American words and phrases that have apparently crept into everyday British English use, as nominated by readers of one of the BBC’s magazines/websites/things. It’s an interesting list, not just for the actual words and phrases themselves, but also for all the cultural insight it gives us into what irritates people about foreign words creeping into their native vocabularies. The British have always had the slightly hypocritical attitude of ‘We can’t stand the way you mangle The Language! (But give us the new season of The Sopranos or we’ll go mad)’. So it surprises me whenever they complain about “Americanisms”, since they’re the ones throwing open the door and rolling out the red carpet for them.   Anyway, here’s the list again , over on the BBC website, and what follows is my own commentary on each one. We’ll do it in two parts, 1 to 25 today, 26 to 50 jutorrow. As always, any comments and...

Addington School has entered 5 fantastic scarecrows into Hornby Mitre 10 Megas Competition - Room 5’s “Basil” Room 7’s “Richie McAppleCaw” Room 4’s “A.J.” (Addington Juniors) Room 3’s “Mr Scarecrow” Room 2’s “Tatty Boggle”. They look amazing and the children have worked really hard creating these characters. Voting starts Saturday 3 September and goes through until the end of Sunday 11 September. Go and vote for your favourites and we could win $500 worth of Gift Cards for our school!!!!