A bouquet for the internet

Despite being a flower ignoramus, when this arrived in our household a couple of months ago I recognised it as an orchid. B is caring for it (otherwise it wouldn't still be alive) and it was he who spotted the similarity to the picture of a flower on a pot of vanilla yoghurt. No. Really? Is vanilla an orchid? Well, blow me down, the internet tells me it is.

I am reduced to indoor flower pictures because by Monday I need to know a lot about literacy in the primary classroom. I last helped primary children read nearly 20 years ago and the National Curriculum has changed 15 million times since then. So I've been reading it, watching videos of primary phonics teaching and exploring literacy teaching resources. All really fascinating and the hours slither away.

Without the internet I would not be able to tell you that without the internet I wouldn't know about vanilla being an orchid and I wouldn't know that 6-year-olds are now supposed to know scarily daunting things about phonemes, graphemes, blending and segmenting.

I don't think the National Curriculum expects them to spell 'orchid' until slightly later, though, and I have no idea when they might learn the connection with vanilla.