It was late last year when I first came across The Lost Words in a bookshop and thought it was a truly beautiful book, with an important purpose. Over the last few years, the Oxford Junior Dictionary has removed words such as conker, bramble, acorn, kingfisher, along with many others which are no longer in common use amongst children. If we forget these words, will we care enough to conserve and protect the natural beauty they represent? Robert and Jackie's wonderful book will hopefully help preserve these words and encourage children to engage with nature.
Following the authors on Twitter, I became aware that a number of people were running crowd funding campaigns to get the book into schools, including Jane Beaton's brilliant effort covering Scotland and the Yellow Lighted Bookshop campaign in Gloucestershire. I think children in Lambeth and Wandsworth should all have access to the book too, so it would be great to have your support to raise the money to do this. Why both boroughs? I live in Lambeth and my partner has taught in Wandsworth schools for the past 17 years, so both are very important to me! There are, by my count, 125 local authority primary schools across the 2 boroughs, so accounting for crowd funding fees, we need to raise £1,400. Every donation will help. If we should beat that target significantly, we could even look to add another borough. Or two.
Please remember if we don't hit the target we can't take any money from anyone and the project won't be funded.
Thank you to Jackie, Rob and the Yellow Lighted Bookshop for their advice and encouragement, and the Big Green Bookshop in Haringey whose own campaign launched at the start of this week and was the final inspiration needed (especially as their campaign is almost fully funded already!)
More information about The Lost Words can be found here: http://www.jackiemorris.co.uk/blog/book-list/the-lost-words-a-spell-of-words-by-robert-macfarlane/
There's also a free educational resource to accompany the book for teachers and parents produced by The John Muir Trust available here (we'll be giving a copy of this to each school with the book) : https://www.johnmuirtrust.org/initiatives/the-lost-words
Finally, you can read more about the overall campaign to get The Lost Words into schools across the country through crowdfunding here: http://www.lostwordsforschools.co.uk/index.html