The Cosmos Chronicle

For most of this summer, firefighters across Europe have been doing the same thing over and over: driving to a field, or a hillside, or the edge of a wood, and stopping a fire before it reaches somebody’s house. In Britain they have been called out to grass fires. In France and Spain they have been fighting the big ones.

It is tempting to imagine some new and dramatic cause. The real one is duller, and more worrying. A fire needs three things — something to burn, air, and a spark. Air is always there. Sparks are always there: lightning, a piece of broken glass, an engine, somebody being careless. The thing that changes is the fuel.

When it has not rained for a long time, grass and leaves and small branches dry out completely. Dry plants catch faster, burn hotter, and hand the flame to the next plant more easily. So the same spark that would have fizzled out in an ordinary summer starts something that takes a hundred people and several aircraft to stop.

It is a strange thing to read about here, in the middle of our own monsoon, with water coming off the roof in sheets. But it is the same idea seen from the other end: how much rain falls, and when it falls, decides an enormous amount about the year that follows.

There is a word for animals treating their own illnesses, and it is a magnificent one: zoopharmacognosy. Break it up and it explains itself — zoo for animal, pharma for medicine, gnosis for knowing. Animal-medicine-knowing.

The best known example is a chimpanzee eating a particular rough, bristly leaf. It does not chew it. It folds the leaf and swallows it whole, and the leaf travels through the gut still folded, scraping parasitic worms out on the way. A chimpanzee with worms will go and find that plant. A healthy one generally will not bother.

The genuinely open question is how they know. Nobody teaches a chimpanzee which leaf to swallow. Some of it may be learned by watching — young chimpanzees copy their mothers relentlessly. Some of it may be that an unwell animal simply craves something different, in the way you might want something sour when you are ill. And some of it, honestly, we do not yet understand.

A school already tells you things. Notes come home, messages arrive, reports are written. So why add a paper on top of all that?

Because those are all the school talking to you. A newspaper is different: it is the school talking to itself, out loud, where everybody can hear. The house standings are not a private matter between the house captains. How the week felt is not a private matter between a child and a teacher. Printing them makes them ours together.

It also makes us careful. Once a number is going to be printed and carried home in a bag, somebody checks it. That is a good discipline for a school to have.

The last reason is the simplest. Children who see their own school in print — their class, their house, their reading — start to believe that what they do is worth writing down. It is.

1. What is 3 × 5?

2. Which country shares a land border with Equatorial Guinea?

3. Which country shares a land border with Burkina Faso?

4. Who invented the World Wide Web?

5. What is the official currency of Angola?

6. Which of these is an official language of Chile?

7. What is the official currency of Brazil?

8. Which country shares a land border with Cambodia?

9. Which country shares a land border with Botswana?

10. Baisakhi is a harvest festival from which Indian state?

R.E.A.D stands for Reading for Engagement, Appreciation and Discovery, and it is the promise underneath it that matters most: every child who leaves Cosmos Primary falls in love with learning, and with reading first.

It is taught in three arcs, and they run all the way up the school rather than one after the other. Decoding is the machinery — the sounds inside words, phonics, word study, and the fluency that lets a child read a word they have never met before. Comprehension is understanding what those words are doing: read alouds, shared reading, vocabulary, grammar, reasoning. Reading to Learn is the point of the whole thing — reading for pleasure, for knowledge, and for the joy of a good story.

The Learnarium is the beating heart of it. Every child visits weekly, and the 100 Book Challenge runs all year. The standings in this paper are counted from real borrowing records, not typed in by hand.

What helps at home is smaller than most parents expect. Read aloud to your child even after they can read alone. Let them re-read the book they have already read four times — that is fluency practice, not laziness. Talk about what happened. A child who is asked what they think about a story is being taught comprehension, whatever room they happen to be sitting in.