PhiliPamInCoventry
Holbrooks
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196 of 431
Wed 12th Jun 2024 12:10am
Hello Anne,
More like a door wedge! It was beautiful. Two & half inches thick. |
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Dreamtime
Perth Western Australia
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197 of 431
Wed 12th Jun 2024 12:52pm
'Shut your cake ole' or I will fill it with a bunch of fives' Not the most ladylike term but it worked. |
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Helen F
Warrington
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198 of 431
Wed 12th Jun 2024 9:09pm
I'm afraid to say anything now |
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Annewiggy
Tamworth
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199 of 431
Thu 13th Jun 2024 11:01am
Scaredy cat ! 🙀 |
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Helen F
Warrington
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200 of 431
Thu 13th Jun 2024 11:09am
Meow. Just call me Tiddles. Meow. |
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Mick Strong
Coventry
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201 of 431
Thu 13th Jun 2024 6:20pm
So, Amanda Holden is to host a new TV show about adultery. Something she should know all about !
She adds " I always wanted to host a show about love and relationships" "A series about second chances and un-finished business"
Perhaps she will invite Neil Morrisey as a guest ?
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Dreamtime
Perth Western Australia
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202 of 431
Fri 14th Jun 2024 3:51pm
On 12th Jun 2024 9:09pm, Helen F said:
I'm afraid to say anything now
Helen, It works every time !
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PhiliPamInCoventry
Holbrooks
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203 of 431
Fri 14th Jun 2024 7:40pm
Hello,
Before I ever arrived into this world, mum & dad lived in both Tipton & Dudley, after being bombed out of Grangmouth Rd. Mum took over a cooked meat shop & made a good pastime selling hot takeaway food. Faggot & pea batches & so on. Dad was working on armoured car development in Bingley Hall.
Anyway, she made confectionery too. Using dried fruit, making pastry sandwiches. She called them "Fly Cemeteries".
I might have mentioned that before on here. |
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Annewiggy
Tamworth
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204 of 431
Fri 14th Jun 2024 9:43pm
They sound a bit like Garibaldi biscuits. We used to call them squashed fly sandwiches, the same as Eccles cakes. Love both |
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PhiliPamInCoventry
Holbrooks
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205 of 431
Sat 15th Jun 2024 6:53am
Hello,
It's Saturday, or Shreddies day.
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PhiliPamInCoventry
Holbrooks
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206 of 431
Sat 15th Jun 2024 7:54am
Hello,
Illiteracy & numeracy!
UNESCO, is reporting that illiteracy is now more prevalent than ever, world wide, Europe included. Germany & France highlighted.
What's going wrong?
Here in the UK, grab an on the spot sample of folk walking through Broadgate, Coventry a bastion of technology & education, the chances are that out of five folk, one will have very limited reading ability in any language & will struggle with the simplest arithmetic.
One in eight of that same sample will have such poor literacy, that they cannot recognise a number, whether it's a quantity or a description.
That scenario is now 100fold increase on the same sampling from 1970.
Someone that I have known for most of my adult life, can hand out an apple to someone, then hand out an apple to someone else, so in his mind he has quantified 2, but he cannot read the number 2. He's worked as a labourer for all of his adult working life, so it's not that he can't think. He can think.
I've got so many questions in my mind about this, but what do we on here think? Coventry is quite bright compared to many other locations that we might pick! |
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JohnnieWalker
Sanctuary Point, Australia
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207 of 431
Sat 15th Jun 2024 8:12am
Hi Philip
Here in the Australian Capital Territory - the most educated city in Australia - they've just discovered that twenty years of schools without phonetics or grammar have resulted in this country plummeting down the advanced countries rankings for literacy. Some doctrinaire "expert" years ago demanded that kids should be encouraged to "guess" how to pronounce a word, and that all kids should go through the exact same process; as a result, our five-year-old daughter was reading Black Beauty at home and bored senseless reading "Look Jane - Look Peter" at school. Fortunately, we were able to shift her to a school linked to - of all places - the French Embassy!
Quotes from the Canberra Times May 3, May 6 2024
An expert report calling for significant changes to how literacy and numeracy is taught in ACT public schools has been widely welcomed as a way to lift student outcomes and reduce teacher workloads. The final report from an independent inquiry recommended a focus on explicit teaching of core skills, standard screening of students and a system to support students before they are left behind.
Retired teacher Anna Linard tutors about 40 Canberra students in reading and numeracy. She was part of a Reading Recovery intervention program for six years but started to question its effectiveness. Since switching to a method of teaching where the phonetic code is taught gradually and supported with what is known as decodable readers, she has seen a huge improvement in her students.
The ACT Alliance for Evidence-Based Education is calling for a chief literacy officer to be employed to oversee a team of literacy coaches to provide training for teachers in the explicit and systematic instruction of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.
And as for maths, I despair - checkout kids can't even work out the bill WITH the aid of a calculator before I tell them the answer! Yet we have contestants on our version of "Letters and Numbers" who are brilliant. The problem is how we teach the least advanced of our primary school kids.
True Blue Coventry Kid
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PhiliPamInCoventry
Holbrooks
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208 of 431
Sat 15th Jun 2024 8:19am
Hello Johnnie,
I wonder if the contestants who "Are brilliant", started their formal schooling, already aware of basic reading & counting?
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JohnnieWalker
Sanctuary Point, Australia
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209 of 431
Sat 15th Jun 2024 8:37am
It wouldn't surprise me at all, Philip. Literacy is hereditary. Our 12-year-old grandson (our aforementioned daughter's son) had a bedtime story read to him by his mum or dad every night from when he was born to when he didn't need help to read. He's got through Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" with about as much understanding of it as I did (possibly more!) and can discuss the implications of it! He tops his class in literacy and numeracy, has started to build robot machines, and is a great goalie for his local football team too!
Yes - that kid was 11 years old when that photo was taken - he had just saved a penalty! His parents had to take his birth certificate to games to prove his age!
Mind you, I don't approve 100% in encouraging infants to read - that aforementioned daughter was given my VERY favourite Bambi picture book to read at bedtime when she was two years old, and she ripped the book to shreds!
True Blue Coventry Kid
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PhiliPamInCoventry
Holbrooks
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210 of 431
Sat 15th Jun 2024 9:13am
Hello again,
Over my lifetime I've had a cross section mix of most of society. I started volunteering with Coventry Mind in 1988, not because of any virtue of mine, it was to help a friend do motor pickups whilst he was on holiday. I loved what I saw being done. So for me involved in the professional part of society along side my volunteering forty years ago, I have a comparison on what I'm seeing now in Coventry.
If I didn't have that personal comparison, I might struggle to believe what I'm now seeing as fact.
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