Welcome to the Clay Lane blog
This page keeps you up-to-date with recent additions, alerts you to posts you may have missed, and invites you to tackle exercises similar to those NL Clay gave to pupils aged 12-13 in the 1930s.
Add Vowels Every Day • Think and Speak
Make as many words as you can by adding vowels (AEIOU) to these consonants.
ts (10+1)
autos. eats. its. oats. outs. teas. tease. tees. ties. toes.
otiose.
Spinners Every Day • Think and Speak
Pick any group of three words, and see if you can still remember them in an hour, and still remember them tomorrow. For a further challenge, try using all of your three words together in a single sentence.
The words in this puzzle are taken randomly from a list of 927 common words. You can change e.g. cat → cats, go → went, quick → quickly.
1 Ahead. Paper. Personal.
2 Lay. Stage. World.
3 Determine. Measure. Party.
Variations: 1. include direct and indirect speech 2. include one or more of these words: although, because, despite, either/or, if, unless, until, when, whether, which, who 3. use negatives (not, isn’t, neither/nor, never, nobody etc.)
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Sir Roger explains why he makes Christmas such a special time for all his neighbours.
Join each group of ideas together to make a single sentence, in as many ways as you can.
Winter is cold. Food is scarce in winter. Winter is hard on poor people. [Cruel. Lack. Year.]
Sir Roger invited in his neighbours every Christmas. They played parlour games. He liked to watch. [Custom. Guest. Spectator.]
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Create sentences in which a particular consonant features prominently and frequently.
In Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation (1936), Bruce Rogers (1870-1967) opened with this:
Peter Piper, without Pretension to Precocity or Profoundness, Puts Pen to Paper to Produce these Puzzling Pages, Purposely to Please the Palates of Pretty Prattling Playfellows, Proudly Presuming that with Proper Penetration it will Probably, and Perhaps Positively, Prove a Peculiarly Pleasant and Profitable Path to Proper, Plain and Precise Pronunciation. He Prays Parents to Purchase this Playful Performance, Partly to Pay him for his Patience and Pains; Partly to Provide for the Printers and Publishers; but Principally to Prevent the Pernicious Prevalence of Perverse Pronunciation.
This repetition of a consonant is called alliteration.
In Think and Speak (1929) NL Clay encouraged his pupils to create their own alliterative sentences. The consonants he recommended were: n, p, r, s, b, d, f, g, j, k and l. You could use this model:
Barry bought a bag of broken biscuits.
If Barry bought a bag of broken biscuits,
Where is the bag of broken biscuits Barry bought?
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Richard Addinsell: Scrooge Suite
Music from the 1951 film Scrooge, starring Alastair Sim. Among the many lovely tunes are the Christmas carols ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ and ‘Silent Night’, and the haunting folksong ‘Barbara Allen’.
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Rewrite these conditional sentences in such a way that the word ‘if’ is not used.
Rewrite these sentences so that they do not use the word ‘if’. For example:
Plenty of time to get there if we take the tube.
→ By taking the tube, we can get there in plenty of time.
→ Let’s take the tube, so we don’t need to worry about getting there in time.
→ Provided we take the tube...
→ Unless we take the tube, we’ll be cutting it a bit fine.
1 If the terms of the treaty were made public, it would mean disaster.
2 If that does not succeed, don’t be discouraged.
3 If you get yourselves into trouble with the police, I can’t officially help you out of it.
Sentences taken from the novels of Agatha Christie.
Based on an exercise in Advanced English Exercises (1939) by NL Clay.
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A profound Christmas hymn by Charles Wesley, welcoming the rising of the Sun of Righteousness.
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Explain what these nouns tell us about our colleague John.
“John? Oh, he’s ________.”
What do we learn about John from these words?
IA hireling. IIA zealot. IIIA timeserver. IVA pedant. VA stoic. VIAn upstart. VIIA highbrow. VIIIA die-hard. IXA turncoat. XA plodder. XIA mouse. XIIA martinet. XIIIA broken reed. XIVA leader. XVA factotum. XVIA sycophant. XVIIA maverick. XVIIIMy right arm. XIXA plant.
Based on an exercise in Advanced English Exercises (1939) by NL Clay.
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