Mister James Teaches English

While it is well known that bees produce honey, many other food sources also rely on bees. Conservative figures show that bees pollinate at least ONE mouthful in every THREE that we eat! Bees around the world, including in Australia, are in serious trouble. Overuse of pesticides and herbicides make bees more vulnerable to disease and pests. Modern agricultural practices and urbanisation are greatly reducing bee habitat and food sources. Scientists are seeing a large decline in bee populations worldwide. This poses a threat not only for our food production but our environment as a whole, as flowering plants rely on pollinators to survive. The good news is we can all do things to help ensure the survival of bees! Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to wa...

Jacquline Woodson, author of Brown Girl Dreaming speaks about the writing process Brown Girl Dreaming and The American Civil Rights Movement The Civil Rights Movement was a multi-decade movement intended to achieve equal rights and treatment for African Americans. The movement is considered to have taken place from 1954–1968, though it drew on a long history of protest against the mistreatment of African Americans. As Woodson notes multiple times in the book, even after the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, Jim Crow laws and general prejudice prevented African Americans from equal treatment in many arenas. Many see the end of World War II as the impetus for the Civil Rights movement. Many African Americans fought in World War II, a war predicated upon the United States's commitment to freedom. This made the blatant discrimination they faced upon returning home to the United States all the more salient. Tensions from the post-war 1940s spilled ...