Clay Lane is inspired by educational materials created NL Clay, and used in English schools and homes from the 1920s to the 1960s. The Blog is a newsletter of recent additions and some selections from our archive, including brainteasers in grammar and vocabulary, and brief passages from history and literature.
You are welcome to ask for my help with any of the materials on Clay Lane. Drop me a line via email to: nicholas@claylane.uk.
Add Vowels
How many words can you make just by adding vowels to these consonants? See if you can get 6.
bndng
Spinner
Make a sentence that uses ALL THREE of these words:
Method. Electric. Term.
These words are served randomly.
You can change e.g. go → went,
or quick → quickly.
Following defeat at Worcester on September 3rd, 1651, King Charles II (who was just twenty-one at the time) reluctantly fled to France, stumbling in disguise towards the south coast, never more than a step ahead of Cromwell’s men. In 1680, the King looked back in the company of Samuel Pepys on those anxious days, and what happened one famous night at Boscobel House in Shropshire.
For discussion. Explain what you would do if (a) you suddenly lost any of the following, or (b) you came across someone else who had.
IGlasses (strong prescription). IIMemory (amnesia). IIIShoe.
Developed from an exercise in Think and Speak (1929) by NL Clay.
For reading aloud. A little poem by Emily Dickinson, from 1877.
They might not need me — yet they might —
I’ll let my Heart be just in sight —
A smile so small as mine might be
Precisely their necessity.
From a letter in the Spring of 1877, to Mrs T. W. (Mary Channing) Higginson. Although Dickinson knew her only through her husband, Colonel Higginson, she often sent a friendly note to her: Emily was aware that she had been in failing health for some years. Mrs Higginson died the following September.
Ben Jonson’s collection of short poems Underwoods was published in 1640, soon after he died. He tells us that it takes its title from a habit of classical poets, who liked to call their miscellanies ‘Woods’. If Jonson’s earlier poems were his woods, he said, then these little additions were shrubs on the woodland floor. The following lines are a reflection on the value of a life.
