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#HistFicThursdays - Gothic Horror - Beneath a Darkening Sky

 Well, this is the last #HistFicThursday blog before I launch Beneath A Darkening Sky at an event in Thurso on Monday 13th . Shame it couldn't be a Friday 13th, but we can't have everything! One thing is for certain: October is the spookiest month. And not just because we have Halloween. Halloween could be a day later and October would still be the spookiest month... Look at how the light retreats at this time of the year: up here, the seasons' turning drains away the daylight at a rate of 2.5hours over the course of this month! Up here, anyway. Our ancestors knew, a long time before they tracked time using clocks, that this month we now call October was a time to look back at what has been and ahead to how we will survive the winter. Is it any wonder then that, with generations of people looking back, October became a month for souls and spectres? People we have loved and lost come back to visit our hearts, imaginations - and, perhaps, our homes - as we recall autumns of ...
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Happy World Book Day - Class Novel 2

As promised, here is my 2nd class novel suggestion for a primary school classroom. It has been tried and tested in my own classroom and the children loved it.

 "Children of Green Knowe" by Lucy Boston is a really great story to read in the lead-up to Christmas.
Here is the blurb from Goodreads:

""Tolly" Toseland 7 is rowed up to great-gran Linnet Oldknow by servant Boggis - there has always been a Boggis at Green Knowe. The real "castle" is over 900 years old. Gran tells old family stories, and songs. Over the generations there have been many who can see, hear, and feel the ghosts, evoked by white-on-black illustrations. Toby 14, Alexander, and Linnet 6 linger after the Plague, as does the cursed topiary Green Noah."

While it is my policy to use the blurbs from Goodreads on my blog, quite frankly, I don't think this blurb does the book justice. It seems to have been written by someone who is trying to bring the book up to date. And, yes, the story is quite old fashioned but what is wrong with that? Sometimes we need a bit old-fashioned.

The children in my class really enjoyed this book, complete with animals, ghosts and a rather scary tree. There are some lessons to be drawn from this book and I will post the lesson plans tomorrow (Friday).

Happy World Book Day!

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