Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus. You may be curious as to what this wonderful looking sentence means. The Welsh (don’t mention last week’s rugby) speakers of you will know that this is the traditional greeting for St David’s day, the patron saint of Wales.
JRR Tolkien was very curious about language and wanted to develop several separate tongues in his fiction. Rather than settling for just Old English or Finnish, he kept exploring and eventually included Welsh in The Hobbit, with the influence of the language clear in Elfish (not a misspelling, and in there lies a tale for another newsletter).
Curiosity is this half term’s Lyonsdown Learning habit, and my assembly this week focused on the importance of asking questions and exploring things that are new to us. To demonstrate this, three brave pupils closed their eyes and stepped into the unknown… by putting their hand into a mystery bowl and describing the contents. The girls and boys had great fun guessing what they were feeling, with surprisingly accurate results. We all agreed that to gain the greatest depth of understanding, we need to be curious, and not always settle on our first answer.
We want Lyonsdown pupils to delve deeper into their learning and experiment with new ideas and hobbies. Opening up new avenues of learning in lessons is a small part of this – answering riddles, entering House competitions, reading a variety of fiction, listening to the news and talking to a wide variety of children and adults are all super examples of how to build children’s curiosity.
The saying goes that curiosity killed the cat. At Lyonsdown, they would have got a house point.
All the best for a pleasant weekend.
C. Hammond
Riddle me this
Ignoring any Marvel references: what is a tesseract?