Words matter. These are the best Michael Rosen Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When territories were settled or invaded by force, the colonisers frequently used names of European monarchs, leaders and the military as part of their settlement. The number of Victorias all over the world are one testimony to that.
Poetry on TV doesn’t have to be like a newscast with someone staring blankly at the camera, pretending they’re not reading from an autocue.
If you think you’re living in an imperfect world, you can write a book about a better world and hope that enough of your readers will notice the difference between the two.
The sentimentalist in me loves it when the important things we say and do can be tied to buildings and landscape.
Academies can also flog off land and buildings, if the much weakened local authorities agree. Serious money can be made, management salaries are high, and hidden in all this is the long-term public subsidy in such sites.
If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.
The starting point for English work must be the ability to handle effectively their own experience. Oral work, written work and the discussion of literature must create an atmosphere in which the pupils become confident of the full acceptability of the material of their own experience.
Anxiety about the possibility that children will be corrupted if they hear rude words has been around for a long time.
Ive lived in London all my life. There are some parts of London where a high percentage of people are on the bottom level of incomes. Treating such people as privileged is absurd and insulting.
Where the government has got it seriously wrong is to imagine that poetry is about right and wrong answers, that poetry has testable outcomes. It doesn’t. Very nearly all poetry is full of ambiguity and suggestiveness.
At around 16, I became obsessed with James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. I was absorbed by the sense of someone trying to break out of an institution but then became interested in Joyces experimental way of writing.
Books for children get into schools. Committed teachers use books like mine alongside films, non-fiction and fiction to help children investigate and understand the Holocaust, persecution and genocide.
Yes, it’s possible to play computer games on your own and many do. But I also see children playing them in pairs and fours for hours on end and the air is full of talk and banter.
My main motive for going into children’s literature was to recreate the helpless giggling that infected me in my childhood. In some ways, I imagine I’m returning the favour.
Change in language is hard to capture and when it’s visible or audible; it is also hard for some to accept.
There should be room in education for schooling to be more responsive to events, more focused on varying interpretations and more able to create artistic and technological responses to the world as it changes.
My parents bookshelves were full of books that belonged to their lives in the Communist party.
You can give up the best years of your life knowing that no matter what you do or how you do it, your step-child may not love you or want or need to have anything to do with you once they have left home.
Poetry has never been written with the intention of making young people irritated, bored, anxious or humiliated, and yet the consequence of the test and exam system often does just that.
The parents who read with their children and fill their houses with books produce the highest achievers.
Reading for pleasure can easily sound like some kind of wishy-washy, soft option, while instructional stuff like learning-to-read through ‘synthetic phonics’ and endless worksheets requiring children to answer questions about the facts in short passages, sounds tough and purposeful.
The world is becoming increasingly changeable and unpredictable, so why should education make the knowledge being passed on so finite and certain; why divide all of it into measurable units?
My own view is that the arts are neither superior nor inferior to anything else that goes on in schools.
We’ve all been children, we all know a parent or parent-figure. This makes us all potential writers of children’s books.
As I began to perform – songs, poems, sketches or conjuring tricks – I began to learn what children run with and what they dont. I discovered that, quite often, an element of surprise or absurdity might be the key to unlocking laughter.
Looking across the many strands of poetry, we can never be certain which poems were only read in private and which were performed – and there are thousands of poems which were performed but never got written down.
People always imagine that the whole of Victorian England was sitting around reading Alice in Wonderland – in fact only a tiny minority ever did.
Purely on their own, words are inert splashes of ink, sound waves, blips on a screen and the like. Our minds perceive these and make meaning and our minds are part of living in the real world.
I came from a home full of the sounds of my parents performing poems or playing recordings of Robert Graves, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas.
Linguists have noticed that across the history of language some words start out as obvious, conscious metaphors and then slowly embed themselves in our daily usage in such a way that we’re no longer aware that they are metaphors.
One of the reasons we invented continuous prose was to lay out an argument, piling points on top of each other, weighing one view against another, even to invite the reader to look back at something earlier or later in a book.
I think the best learning takes place when you create an atmosphere of curiosity and excitement.
I love rereading Shakespeare plays and Im constantly finding bits that Ive overlooked or not understood before.
What happens on the ground is that schools have been required to follow a literacy matrix – yes, some schools junked it – but most schools follow it. This matrix determined what children have to study and when.
The way to take the arts seriously is not to defend this or that art form for its own sake. Pursuing arts activities with humane and democratic principles in mind is where the benefit lies.
The main problem with people not reading to their children is the lack of a bridge between schools and families, so that children don’t see books and learning as a separate part of life.
Whether were parents, carers, teachers or anyone working with young children, we know that children move easily and often between free play and structured play. One is not better or worse than another, they each offer different experiences, different ways of thinking, and different kinds of learning.
Since 1988, successive governments have treated education as an electoral asset: theyve come up with endless slogans and projects to supposedly solve what is supposedly a crisis.
If you say to teachers, how can we, with the resources we’ve got here, develop a policy on reading books, then within minutes, people have ideas, make plans, invent activities.
The wave of feeling that can overcome an adult when he or she opens a book that was read to them by a loved parent or teacher can be quite stunning.
Social groups in society don’t swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.
Anyway, once children get to talk, they seem to be finding ways to joke.
Lists, and lists of lists, invite many questions and one that crops up here is: what makes a children’s book last? When it’s books for very young children, this is a matter that is almost entirely at the behest of adults – parents, teachers, critics, librarians.
A society based on a market economy which decided that people should only be allowed to take up senior positions in business, administration and the professions purely on merit would have to abolish the main mechanisms for taking up the top positions in society: inherited wealth, tax havens and private education.
I understand that more and more children under the age of 10 go to bed without having something read to them or reading something themselves. Instead, there are more and more TVs in children’s bedrooms and they are going to sleep watching TV.
Books are low-tech, portable packages of the widest range of human experience, presented in a format which gives time to grasp complex ideas or to spend time in imaginative worlds.
Any child who reads widely, often and for pleasure will inevitably make comparisons between what they’re reading, why they’re reading and how they’re reading.
The arts investigate the properties of the world by playing with materials – such as stone, paint, fabric, synthetic substances, the human body, the human voice and of course language.
There’s no one right way to teach poetry in schools.
A Christmas Carol’ is one of a few literary works that can be cited as a common cultural reference point, so its a text people imagine theyve read without having done so.
Writing limericks gives us a playground, a release from these conventions.
Across the many years I’ve been involved with arts education, I have seen countless projects, schemes, partnerships and programmes, on and off site, being developed, flowering and then getting phased out.
When someone dies, you have to do many things that mark it: telling other people, getting rid of the body, writing to the bank, the tax man, the magazines and shops he subscribed to. No matter how hard this is, doing all this tells you it’s really happened.
I’ve seen after-school clubs where parents, teachers and children have got together to write books. They were in a mix of languages; the books told stories of what the parents got up to when they were children and how they arrived in the area, whether it was from another country or from the other side of town.
When you break a poem down in order to perform it, you have to engage closely with many aspects of what it’s about, how it works, how it’s constructed and so on. If you write a poem alongside it, to complement it, you start to feel poetry’s method, poetry’s way of looking at things.
