Dear Mr Gove – Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!

Dear Mr Gove

dear mr gove today I taught the children not to sit like bags of small potatoes in their chairs I taught them how to breathe with their bellies like babies do when they are sleeping we pretended we were balloons of different colours filling up with air dear mr gove we played long note beat that we looked up who holds the world record for the longest note it was a clarinet player who managed to play for one minute and thirteen seconds without taking a breath we held our notes as if we were monks singing a drone in a cathedral where the roof rises like a giant wing against the sky dear mr gove today the whole class played hot cross buns we talked about the great height of the note E we held thin blue straws between our lipls and some of us went on to play an E and some of us fell towards a low A with its ledger line hovering above it and another piercing its poor head dear mr gove we are brilliant at trying some of us know what crotchets and minims are and we will know this all our lives but some of us still call them black and white notes we make up sayings to help us read like Elephants Go Bananas Doing Flips like Electric Green Brains Dance Forever we play the riff to Eye of The Tiger and sing along in the voices of tigers if tigers had voices like ours today Mrs Johnson forgot how to play a D and Harry told her which valves to press I do not know how to measure this mr gove please send help and there is also the problem of Matthew who cannot read or write too well but who can play Mary Had A Little Lamb with perfect pitch there is the problem of his smile afterwards and how we write this down today we watched the muppets singing bohemian rhapsody for no good reason other than that it was fun and while I am confessing small transgressions last week we watched mr bean play an invisible drum kit the children have been playing an invisible drum kit in the playground dear mr gove I did not stop them today we talked about the muscles in the lip and tongue we did not know we had control of so many muscles we tried to look like musicians mr gove please help us