Thanks to Rosemary for this …

Caldecott School is asking local shoppers to support their project to provide a new sensory garden for their pupils. They’re hoping to convert an old courtyard in the centre of the school into an attractive and welcoming outdoor space that can be used as a quiet seating area for children at break and lunchtimes, a calm area for mentoring, as well as an outdoor classroom, with opportunities for science, art and literacy.

The children are very much at the centre of the project. The school council organised a survey to find out the type of seating, planters and water features that the children would like and they’ll be able to contribute their own artwork in the form of a huge mosaic. Now local stores have stepped in to help.

Caldecott’s garden project was one of the good causes in Waitrose’s Community Matters project in April and will be one of Tesco’s Bags of Help causes throughout May and June. They’re hoping that Tesco’s customers in Abingdon and Wantage will give them enough votes to ensure they will be able to create the garden.

It doesn’t seem long since we were remembering the centenary of the start of WWI.

There was a moving ceremony with a reading of the names from the Abingdon (Borough) Roll of Service August 1914 – June 1919, and a candle-lit ceremony round the War Memorial.

At Abingdon Library there is an board telling of an on-going project telling A Soldier’s Tale through THE FIRST WORLD WAR, TOLD THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA AS IF IT WERE TODAY. The aim of the project is to capture the imagination of 13-18 year olds using a medium they know, understand and use.

Walter Carter, the soldier in the tale, is currently in a mental hospital undergoing treatment for shell shock.

Above are pictured a group of Carters from Abingdon who died during WWI. They each had their story, which was not fiction, and cost them their lives.

What a nice suprise it was today on arriving home from work to find a book of poems celebrating 25 years of the Unicorn School – addressed to me at the Abingdon Blog. It is full of poems and drawings and shows how much the children appreciate their small school, the friendliness, small classes, and to be in a place where they can enjoy learning, even if they have to get up so early to get there.

The Unicorn School is a school that helps children with dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalcula, speech and language.

Fifty years ago, my sister struggled at academic subjects from an early age, and I could not understand why she was always in the bottom set. It was only when she went to Redhill Technical College that a recently diagnosed condition, dyslexia, was suggested. She was always articulate, but lost the thread when trying to write those thoughts down, and writing was all that school examiners ever saw.