What is The Lost Words? Well the book is about words that are disappearing from children’s vocabularies. Words that are the names for beautiful, wild things like otters, kingfishers, bluebells and newts.

"Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed - fading away like water on stone. The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them: acorn; adder; bluebell; bramble; conker - gone! Fern, heather, kingfisher, otter, raven, willow, wren...all of them gone.!" And so begins Lost Words.

. The Lost Words was created to celebrate and revive once-common “nature” words – from acorn and wren, to conker and dandelion – dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary (and replaced by words like broadband and blog).

In The Lost Words, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris take twenty of these words and infuse them with new life through brilliant writing and glorious illustrations. The book is a magical way of summoning the words back into children’s lives. It’s been described as ‘breathtaking’ (The New Statesman); ‘exquisite’ (The Guardian); ‘hauntingly beautiful’ (The Washington Post), ‘luminous’ (The Times), and ‘wonderful’ (The Telegraph).

..Let's help our children to reclaim the natural world for themselves! The Lost Words is a spell book, a beautiful book of words, poetry and stunning pictures that will inspire any child who is lucky enough to see a copy.

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.. A recent crowdfunder raised the money to buy a copy of this book for every school in the whole of Scotland! See what inspired me here (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/10/the-lost-words-campaign-delivers-nature-spellbook-to-scottish-schools)

The publisher Hamish Hamilton has very kindly given us £40% off the RRP which is fantastic and brought our target down! The target includes the Justgiving Fees and postage to some schools although we will try to hand deliver as many as we can!

Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could raise enough money for every lower school, middle school and primary school in Bedford Borough to have a copy of their own? Thank you for your support and imagination!

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

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Let's get this beautiful book into every lower, primary and middle school in Bedford Borough and be part of something really special.